Philip E. Paré
KTH Royal Institute of Technology

 

Abstract

The study of epidemic processes has been a topic of interest for many years over a wide range of areas, including computer science, mathematical systems, biology, physics, social sciences, and economics.More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of epidemic processes focused on the spread of viruses over networks, motivated not only by security threats posed by computer viruses, but also recent devastating outbreaks of infectious diseases and the rapid spread of opinions and misinformation over social networks.Up to this point these network-dependent spread models have not been validated by real data.

In this talk, we analyze mathematical models for network-dependent spread and use that analysis to identify the healing and infection parameters of the model. We begin with a single virus model and apply these ideas, employing John Snow's foundational work on cholera epidemics in London in the 1850's, to validate the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model. The validation results are surprisingly good, capturing the behavior of the cholera epidemic from John Snow's 1854 dataset quite well. We then discuss a model for multiple competing viruses over multi-layered networks and apply the results to two competing USDA farm subsidy programs. We conclude by briefly highlighting extensive analysis and control algorithm design results we have obtained for time-varying and infrastructure networks, and finally discuss various directions for compelling future work.

 

Bio

Philip E. Paré received his B.S. in mathematics with University Honors and his M.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 2012 and 2014, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana, IL in 2018. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Decision and Control Systems in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Philip was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Robert T. Chien Memorial Award for excellence in research from the UIUC ECE Department and named a 2017-2018 UIUC College of Engineering Mavis Future Faculty Fellow. His research interests include the modeling, control, and security of dynamic networked systems, such as, epidemiological, biological, economic systems, and social networks.

 

Host
Prof. Sundaram, sundara@purdue.edu, 49-60406)