Cimplex

Contact Person: Dr. Olivia Woolley

Duration: 01/2015 - 12/2017

Funding: EU Horizon 2020

Website: external page www.cimplex-project.eu

Description:
Together with our consortium partners in DFKI, University of Stuttgart, UCL, CEU, ISI, CNR and FBK, we have been awarded the prestigious ERC Horizon 2020 grant for our project "Bringing Citizens, Models and Data together in Participatory, Interactive Social Exploratories" (CIMPLEX). The core aim of CIMLPEX is to develop the modeling, computational, and ICT tools needed to predict and influence the spread of disease and other contagion phenomena in complex social systems. We will study how contagion processes interact with social adaptation, economic changes, and other systemic aspects that will finally allow a complete analysis of the inherent systemic risk. In order to improve the impact of policy and social response we will 1) work to close the loop between models, data, behavior and perception, and 2) develop new concepts for the explanation, visualization and interaction between data and models both on the individual and collective level.

Our team will focus on producing fundamental theoretical and methodological advances. In particular we will study 1) the interaction and feedback between multiple spreading processes, 2) the interaction between a spreading process and the behavioral changes that occur in response to the available information about this process, 3) what information needs to be centrally collected or made available to individuals in order to contain an epidemic while maximising personal privacy, 4) mechanisms that will support the voluntary sharing of this information by individual users. We will also participate in the empirical evaluation of the ICT platform by testing its effectiveness in the specific case of containing the spread of disease.

Lucas Böttcher, Olivia Woolley-Meza, Nuno A.M. Araujo, Hans J. Herrmann and Dirk Helbing. (2014). external page Disease-Induced Resource Constraints Can Trigger Explosive Pandemics. SSRN.