SGER: Towards Computational Epidemiology:Designing an Infectious Disease Outbreak Simulator

该项目侧重于计算科学的一个新分支，即计算流行病学，这是一项与国民健康相关的跨学科、小规模、探索性、高风险研究。具体地说，该项目将完成设计和实施传染病暴发模拟器的复杂任务。这一工具不仅允许流行病学家对流行病事件的空间进展进行假设，还将允许计算机科学家研究部署通信基础设施对控制和遏制疾病爆发的影响。这标志着一项相当雄心勃勃的努力，因为它需要解决根植于图论、随机建模、医学地理以及高性能网络和计算的问题。开发的模拟器不仅将作为流行病学家的调查和分析计算工具，而且将是帮助开发医疗保健提供者之间所需通信基础设施的必要工具。它可用于调查通过对等网络(例如，对等网格计算)向流行病学家提供访问分布式信息和/或访问传感器网络的有效性。换句话说，使用该模拟器进行的实验研究将为如何设计通信基础设施和如何适当分布传感器网络组件提供指导。该模拟器的设计可以被视为对计算流行病学领域的早期贡献。

This project is focusing on a new branch of computational science, i.e. computational epidemiology, an interdisciplinary, small scale, exploratory, high risk research with relevance to national health. Specifically, this project will accomplish a complex task of designing and implementing a simulator of an Infectious Disease Outbreak. This tool will not only allow epidemiologist to hypothesize on the spatial progression of an epidemiological event, but will allow computer scientists to study the effects of deploying a communication infrastructure on control and containment of a disease outbreak. This marks a rather ambitious endeavor, as it requires solutions to problems that are rooted in graph theory, stochastic modeling, medical geography, and high performance networking and computing. The developed simulator will serve not only as an investigative and analytical computational tool for epidemiologists, but will also be an essential tool to help develop the required communication infrastructure among healthcare providers. It can be used to investigate the effectiveness of providing epidemiologists with access to distributed information via peer-to-peer networks (e.g. peer-to-peer grid computing) and/or access to sensor networks. In other words, experimental studies conducted with this simulator will provide guidance in the decisions how to design the communication infrastructure and how to appropriately distribute sensor network components. The design of this simulator can be viewed as an early contribution to the field of computational epidemiology.