Epiwork
Epiwork
The EPIWORK project proposes a multidisciplinary research effort aimed at developing the appropriate framework of tools and components-epiwork knowledge needed for the design of epidemic forecast infrastructures to be used in by epidemiologists and public health scientists. The project is a truly interdisciplinary effort, anchored to the research questions and needs of epidemiology research by the participation in the consortium of leading epidemiologists, public health specialists and mathematical biologists.
Epidemic researchers along with informatics, computer science, complex systems and physics leading scientists, will tackle most of the much needed development in epidemic forecast of modeling, computational and ICT tools such as
- the foundation and development of the mathematical and computational methods needed to achieve prediction and predictability of disease spreading in complex techno-social systems;
- the development of large scale, data driven computational models endowed with a high level of realism and aimed at epidemic scenario forecast;
- the design and implementation of original data-collection schemes motivated by identified modelling needs, such as the collection of real-time disease incidence, through innovative web and ICT applications;
- the set up of a computational platform for epidemic research and data sharing that will generate important synergies between research communities and countries.
A fully operational, accurate and reliable epidemic forecast infrastructure nowadays faces problems related to the lack of appropriate models to understand how an infectious disease spreads in the real world, lack of extensive and accurate epidemiologically relevant data (from societal data to epidemic surveillance data), lack of understanding of the interplay among the various scales of the problem (from the host-pathogen interaction, to human-to-human transmission, to the interaction with the environment) and most importantly lack of communication among the different areas of research which proceed almost independently, crucially hampering a significant progress in a highly interdisciplinary field of research. The present project intends to fill this gap. Through computational thinking, complex systems concepts and data integration tools relevant for epidemiological understanding at all levels, it will provide a set of radical, paradigm-changing results enabling a novel approach to the modelling, forecast and policy making approach to infectious diseases. The projects overarching goals are:
- The identification of general principles and laws that characterize complexity and capture the essence of complex epidemiological systems.
- The development of a collaborative information platform enabling the production of knowledge, understanding and models from the novel abundance of digital data in epidemic research.
- The development of an open, data driven, computational modelling platform to be used in epidemic research as well as in policy making for the analysis of global epidemics, integrating and leveraging on transnational data.
- The development, deployment and validation of an Internet-based Monitoring System (IMS) producing real time data on disease incidence and epidemic spreading.
Epiwork
01 Feb 2009 00:00
31 Jan 2013 00:00
European Commission
SCS colloquium: N. Javaheri
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