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Tuesday, April 29, 2014 Talk:
4:00 p.m., Avery 115
Reception:
3:30 p.m., Avery 348
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Caterina Scoglio, Ph.D.
Professor, Kansas State UniversityAbstract
In this talk, I will fist give an overview of my group's research work in the field of mathematical models of spreading processes. In the second part of the talk, I will provide details on some recent results concerning the impact of human behavior changes in the evolution of the spreading process, and prove how the dissemination of preventive information can reduce the size of an epidemic. To this end, we have developed the Susceptible-Alert-Infected-Susceptible (SAIS) model as an extension of the SIS (Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible) model. In the SAIS model, “alert” individuals observe the health status of neighbors in their contact network, and as a result, they may adopt a set of cautious behaviors to reduce their infection rate. This alertness, when incorporated in the mathematical model, results in an increase of the range of effective/relative infection rates for which initial infections die out. Built upon the SAIS model, our work also has investigated how information dissemination increases this range, hence boosting the population against epidemic spreading. Finally, I will give an overview of a new epidemic model of two exclusive, competitive viruses over a two-layer network with generic structure, where network layers represent the distinct transmission routes of the viruses. We find analytical results determining extinction, mutual exclusion, and coexistence of the viruses by introducing the concepts of survival threshold and winning threshold. The main outcome of our analysis is discovery and proof of long-term coexistence of viruses as an emergent phenomenon for SIS-type competitive spreading over multilayer networks, which cannot be attributed to any single-layer contact network topology. We believe our methodology has great potentials for application to broader classes of multi-pathogen spreading over multi-layer and interconnected networks.
Speaker Bio
Caterina M. Scoglio is a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA. She joined Kansas State University as an associate professor in 2005. Before joining Kansas State University, she worked at the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Rome, Italy, from 1987 to 2000, and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, from 2000 to 2005. She received the Dr.Eng. degree in electronics engineering from the “Sapienza” Rome University, Rome, Italy, in 1987. Her main research interests include modeling and analysis of complex networks, with applications to epidemic spreading and nanomaterials.