Health IT > Health IT (HIT) Seminar > Abstracts
Large-scale Social Simulations for Public Health: Computational Challenges and Opportunities
John J. Grefenstette
Director, Public Health Dynamics Laboratory
and Professor of Biostatistics
Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh
Thursday, 16 February 2012
1:30 PM – Reddy Conference Room, Gates & Hillman Centers 4405
Abstract
The accelerating growth in data availability and corresponding advances in high performance computing present new opportunities for in silico analysis of complex public health questions using computational modeling and simulation. FRED (A Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics) is an open source, modeling system developed by the University of Pittsburgh Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL) in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. FRED supports research on the dynamics of infectious disease epidemics, and the interacting effects of mitigation strategies, viral evolution, and personal health behavior. The system uses agent-based modeling based on census-based synthetic populations that capture the demographic and geographic distributions of the population, as well as detailed household, school, and workplace social networks. In this talk, we will describe how we use simulations to help evaluate health policy questions concerning areas such as vaccination, anti-viral drugs, and school closure. We will also discuss challenges including modeling dynamic social structures and incorporating more sophisticated models of human health behavior into our models.
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