SGER: Towards Computational Epidemiology:Designing an Infectious Disease Outbreak Simulator

University Of North Texas, Denton TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project is focusing on a new branch of computational science, i.e. computational epidemiology, an interdisciplinary, small scale, exploratory, high risk research with relevance to national health. Specifically, this project will accomplish a complex task of designing and implementing a simulator of an Infectious Disease Outbreak. This tool will not only allow epidemiologist to hypothesize on the spatial progression of an epidemiological event, but will allow computer scientists to study the effects of deploying a communication infrastructure on control and containment of a disease outbreak. This marks a rather ambitious endeavor, as it requires solutions to problems that are rooted in graph theory, stochastic modeling, medical geography, and high performance networking and computing. The developed simulator will serve not only as an investigative and analytical computational tool for epidemiologists, but will also be an essential tool to help develop the required communication infrastructure among healthcare providers. It can be used to investigate the effectiveness of providing epidemiologists with access to distributed information via peer-to-peer networks (e.g. peer-to-peer grid computing) and/or access to sensor networks. In other words, experimental studies conducted with this simulator will provide guidance in the decisions how to design the communication infrastructure and how to appropriately distribute sensor network components. The design of this simulator can be viewed as an early contribution to the field of computational epidemiology.