Assisting H1N1 and Ebola Outbreak Response through High Performance Networked Epidemiology

Summary form only given, as follows. The H1N1 pandemic of 2009 and the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa serve as a reminder of the social, economic and health burden of infectious diseases. The ongoing trends towards urbanization, global travel, climate change and a generally older and immuno-compromised population continue to make epidemic planning and control challenging. Recent quantitative changes in high performance pervasive computing have created new opportunities for collecting, integrating, analyzing and accessing information related to large urban social systems, disease surveillance and global logistics and supply chains. The advances in network and information science that build on this new capability provide entirely new ways for reasoning and controlling epidemics. In this talk I will overview of the state of the art in computational networked epidemiology with an emphasis on computational thinking and on the development of high performance computing oriented decision-support environments for planning and response in the event of epidemics. I will describe how such systems can be used to support near real-time planning and response during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu and the recent Ebola Outbreak in West Africa. Computational challenges and directions for future research will be discussed.