Berlin 2005 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SYBN: Biological and Social Networks

SYBN 1: Biologische und Soziale Netzwerke I

SYBN 1.3: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 7. März 2005, 10:45–11:15, TU HE101

Epidemic modeling: dealing with complex networks — •Alessandro Vespignani — School of Informatics and Department of Physics, Indiana University — Lab. Physique Theorique, Universite Paris Sud, Paris

The systematic study of population networks and their social/spatial structure has shown the ubiquitous presence of complexity features mathematically encoded in heavy-tailed statistical distributions, diverging fluctuations and emerging properties. Despite a variety of approaches have been developed in order to take into account the many complications and heterogeneities observed in the spread of epidemics, complexity is not the same as the sum of the merely complicated elements accounted for in sophisticate epidemic modeling. Indeed complex properties generally correspond to the breakdown of standard models. For instance this is the case of epidemic spreading in scale-free networks in which the lack of any intrinsic epidemic threshold generates a peculiar scenario with implications in immunization and containment policies. In this perspective we will provide a discussion of epidemic modeling that accounts for the presence of the network’s complexity at various levels: connectivity pattern, traffic intensity, population heterogeneity. Finally, we will discuss to which extent the protection of populations, defined in the context of immunization policies designed to effectively reduce or prevent the large scale spreading of epidemics, is affected by the system’s complexity.