About
The project description readily conveys the need for a wide variety of skills and competencies, ranging from complex systems theory and computational modelling to computer science, statistical physics and epidemiology. The consortium consists of 12 teams in 8 different countries that provide these competencies and that have skills and expertise that are documented by numerous publications and participation and leadership roles in previous European network projects.
In the Diagram we show the interaction network where each node represents the consortium teams and the links the dependency of work on each WP departing from the WP leader.
Partners
1. ISI - Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Italy
Team Leader: Prof. Alessandro Vespignani
2. FGC-IGC - Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian - Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal
Team Leader: Gabriela Gomes
3. TAU - Tel Aviv University
Team Leader: Prof. Lewi Stone
4. MPG - Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization,Germany
Team Leader: Dirk Brockmann
5. AIBV - Acquisto Inter BV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Team Leader: Ronald Smallemburg
6. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK
Team Leader: Prof. John Edmunds, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
7. SMI - The Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, Stockholm, Sweden
Team Leader: Prof. Olof Nyrén MD DMSci
8. KULeuven - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Team Leader: Prof. Marc Van Ranst
9. BIU - Bar Llan University, Israel
Team Leader: Prof. Shlomo Havlin
10. FBK - Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Team Leader: Stefano Merler, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
11. CREATE-NET - Center for REsearch And Telecommunication Experimentation for NETworked communities
Team Leader: Daniele Miorandi
12. FFCUL - Faculty of Sciences University of Lisbon
Team Leader: Mário J. Silva
1. ISI - Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Italy
Team Leader: Prof. Alessandro Vespignani
Web Page: http://www.isi.it;
The ISI Foundation (www.isi.it) is a private research institution located in Turin, Italy. It is founded and supported by the Regional Government, the Province of Turin, the City of Turin, and by the two major Bank Institutions in Piedmont - San Paolo and CRT Foundation. Its mission focuses on promoting scientific interchange and cooperation at the highest degree of quality both in terms of creativity and originality of research. It aims to represent a pole of high level interdisciplinary training in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science and Life Sciences. The ISI Foundation consists of four main research Divisions and nine laboratory/Units lead by international level scientists, while the SAB (Scientific Advisory Board) has the duty of identifying the research lines of the Institute.
The ISI research unit, participating to this project, the Complex Networks & Systems Laboratory, gather an extensive range of scientific expertise in both areas of computational modelling of infectious diseases and in the development of cyberinfrastructure and data integration tools. The staff in che CNLL has applied these skills in the large scale simulation of emerging disease at the world-wide level, the study of transportation and mobility infrastructures on epidemic spreading patterns, census database integration, the development of data visualization techniques. The research activity of the CNLL also focuses on the study of the emergence, characterization and impact of complexity in biological and ecological networks and social/behavioral networks. Finally, the ISI team has been active in testing and deploying the Influweb monitoring platform (www.influweb.it). This platform is integrated with the analogous projects in the Netherlands and Portugal which are at the core of WP4. The international nature of the Institute allows the team to mantain ongoing collaborations with the National Institute of Health (INSERM) and the University of Paris-Sud in France, with the Indiana University and Boston University in the US, and with the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Spain.
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2. FGC-IGC - Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian - Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal
Team Leader: Gabriela Gomes
Web Page: http://www.igc.gulbenkian.pt
The Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian (FCG) is a private non-profit organization with four statutory goals: “charity, art, education and science”. The Gulbenkian Science Institute (Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, IGC) (hereinafter referred to as “FCG-IGC”) was founded and is supported by the Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian to carry on biomedical research and education. The FCG-IGC operates a “host institution”, offering excellent facilities and services to foreign and Portuguese research groups or individual scientists, in particular to young scientists who are expected to develop and manage their research projects and form their groups in complete autonomy.
The Institute’s scientific interests are focused (i) on the genetic basis of development and evolution of complex systems, privileging organisms-centered approaches in experimental models that include plants, yeast, worms, flies, fish, chick and mice, and (ii) on the genetics of complex human diseases. Other FCG-IGC specificities are the theoretical studies sector, although with a small dimension/impact, the quality of the central services and facilites offere, and a strong investment on international exchange in the form of graduate courses, workshops and symposia.
In 2005, the IGC established the Collaboratorium in Computational Biology, an open host organization designed to enable intense cooperation amongst researchers from national and international institutions: the center hub of a collaborative network of research institutions. Its chief aims are to provide suitable facilities for visiting scientists, and hosting informatics technology to enable continuing off-site collaboration and research in Mathematical and Computational Biology.
Moreover, over the last few years, the IGC has developed a dedicated science communication programme to promote public engagement in science through direct, two-way communication between scientists and the public. This programme targets a range of audiences, including schools (students and teachers), the media, decision-makers, community and patient groups and the general public. Within this programme, the IGC holds interactive meetings between scientists and different publics, workshops and hands-on activities, open days, develops information materials and education resources. Recent activities include the publication of a teenage novel written in close collaboration with scientists and the start of a philantrophy/fundraising programme aimed at establishing alternative funding opportunities for scientific research, at the same time as further involving Portuguese society in science and scientific culture.
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3. TAU - Tel Aviv University
Team Leader: Prof. Lewi Stone
Web Page: http://www.tau.ac.il/lifesci/departments/zoology/members/stone/stone.html
Located in Israel’s cultural, financial and industrial heartland, Tel Aviv University is the largest university in Israel. It is a major center of teaching and research, comprising nine faculties, 106 departments, and 90 research institutes. With close to 30,000 students, the University offers an extensive range of study programs in the arts and sciences, within its Faculties of Engineering, Exact Sciences, Life Sciences, Medicine, Humanities, Law, Social Sciences, Arts and Management.
For more than ten years Prof. Stone has directed a Biomathematics Unit located in the university’s Faculty of Life Sciences. The unit has broad interest in the epidemiology, population dynamics, and the evolution of infectious diseases, and in developing mathematical modelling and statistical techniques for analysing disease data. Much of the unit’s work has been concerned with recurrent infectious diseases (measles, mumps and chickenpox), effective vaccination schemes and more recently influenza models. Highlights of their work include the development of pulse vaccination schemes, and predictive epidemic forecasting tools.
The unit has strong links with the Israel Center of Disease Control (ICDC) and the Center’s Director, Prof. Tami Shochat, is involved with common projects. The unit also has a working collaboration with Dr. Eli Stern and Dr. Amit Huppert in the Gertner Center of Health Risk Analysis, in joint projects on influenza dynamics in Israel.
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4. MPG - Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Germany
Team Leader: Dirk Brockmann
Web Page: http://www.nld.ds.mpg.de
The Department of Nonlinear Dynamics (NLD) is the theory department of the Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) and was founded in 1996. Research conducted in the Department is primarily concerned with the dynamics of complex systems such as transport in nanostructures and quantum chaos and applying methods from nonlinear dynamics, complex network theory, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and high performance computing to the study of complex biological networks and computational neuroscience. In 2003 a team of NLD lead by Dirk Brockmann initiated a scientific focus on the dynamics of human infectious diseases and anomalous dispersal phenomena in spatially structured systems. Today a substantial effort is devoted to this subject within the department. The team now consists of nine members (staff scientists, independent research fellows, postdocs and students) and closely collaborates with the independent research group “Network dynamics” lead by Dr. Marc Timme at the Institute and with Dr. Fabian Theis, head to the Research Gropu “Computational Modelling in Biology” at the Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at the Helmholtz Center in Munich, who is affiliated with the MPIDS as a Bernstein Fellow. In the past few years the group has published several influential articles on quantitative models of the worldwide spread of emergent human infectious diseases and statistical laws that underlie human travel behavior, fundamental theoretical results on synchronization phenomena in coupled network systems and the development of powerful numerical bioinformatic techniques in systems biology. NLD collaborates intensively with epidemiologists at the Center of Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD), USA and the Department of Zoology, Oxford as well as various groups across different disciplines.
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5. AIBV - Acquisto Inter BV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Team Leader: Ronald Smallemburg
Web Page http://www.degrotegriepmeting.nl; http://www.acquisto-inter.com
Acquisto Inter BV is a consultancy and project management firm in science and science communication. Among others, we are the organizers of the annual Grote Griepmeting (GGM) or Great Influenza Survey in the Netherlands and Belgium since 2003. The GGM is an internet-based monitoring system (IMS), including a weekly survey of influenza-like illness (ILI). It was an instant success with over 31,000 Dutch and Belgian volunteers (so called ‘flu meters’) filling in their health status on a regular basis in order to reinforce scientific research on ILI surveillance practices. The total number of accounts amounts to 55,000. The GGM website contains all kind of education material including digital lessons on influenza, epidemiology and statistics, ‘flu’ games, et. al. for age groups from 6 to 18 years. Journalists, policy makers and researchers will find the latest ILI surveillance data. Over 135 publications and radio/tv items were dedicated to the GGM. This publicity was the main source of recruiting thousands of participants. Due to this success, the GGM team was encouraged to organize surveys in subsequent seasons. In the Netherlands, the project is officially acknowledged as a new, representative and scientifically reliable method of ILI surveillance (as confirmed in two studies) to be continued in the following years in tight cooperation with the Dutch health care authorities, represented by RIVM. We expect the federal health care authorities in Belgium to follow soon. In 2005, Sander Van Noort introduced the GGM as www.gripenet.pt in Portugal where it currently attracts 3,800 Portuguese volunteers. In 2007, ISI in Italy introduced www.influweb.it.
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6. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK
Team Leader: Prof. John Edmunds
Web Page: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is Britain’s national school of public health. Part of the University of London , the London School is an internationally recognized center of excellence in public health, international health and tropical medicine with a remarkable depth and breadth of expertise. It is one of the highest-rated research institutions in the UK. Mathematical modelling has a long history at the London School (e.g. Ross and MacDonald’s archetypal model of malaria, and Paul Fine’s classic work on measles and pertussis), and the newly created Center for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, at the School aims to build on this history, bringing together mathematical modellers across the different departments at the School. Prof. Edmunds has a significant track record in the development and application of mathematical models to predict the spread of infectious disease and the impact of control programmes. He is a member of the UK Governments advisory committee on Pandemic Influenza (SPI), the SPI Modelling subgroup, as well as a number of other advisory bodies both nationally and internationally (e.g. WHO and ECDC). He has been at the forefront of developing novel techniques for elucidating contemporary mixing pattern data. Prof. Edmunds maintains close links with the HPA and has an honorary appointment at the HPA. He also maintains close links with the Department of Health, and continues to advise them on pandemic influenza and other infectious disease control issues. His role on these committees will ensure that the results of EPIWORK will be disseminated to and exploited by relevant bodies within the UK, and will help shape future policy.
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7. SMI - The Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, Stockholm, Sweden
Team Leader: Prof. Olof Nyrén MD DMSci
Web Page: http://www.smittskyddsinstituet.se
SMI is a government expert agency, located on the Karolinska Instituet campus and having the following tasks:
- Surveillance of notifiable infectious diseases according to Swedish law;
- Surveillance of the Swedish paediatric vaccination programme;
- Surveillance of the annual influenza vaccination of risk groups;
- National reference laboratory;
- Microbiological preparedness center;
- Research institute;
SMI collaborates with several government authorities and other organisations within the field of infectious disease control and prevention. SMI coordinates the Basic Surveillance Network (BSN), fundend by the European Commission. Therefore, SMI has acquired considerable expertise in infectious disease surveillance, notably strengths and weaknesses of various methodological approaches. SMI is, further, deeply involved in the planning of responses to public health emergencies, among them pandemic influenza. Moreover, SMI combines epidemiological insight, specific expertise in virtually all communicable diseases, state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, and frontline basic research in virology and microbiology. In addition, there is an active group working with epidemic modelling, involved in the MODELREL and INFTRANS collaborations, and which takes advantage of the rich availability of detailed Swedish register data for microsimulation models.
The researchers at SMI are academically affiliated with Karolinska Instituet (KI), which is Sweden’s only university especially focusing on biomedical sciences. Within Sweden, KI is responsible for some 40% of all medical research in universities and colleges and for about 12% of research education. There are more than 600 research units in some 30 departments, comprising approximately 2700 research staff and about 2500 postgraduate students. Researchers at KI publish annually more than 3000 papers, which receive 45% more citations than the world average.
More specifically, the epidemiologists are affiliated with the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB), which is one of the largest and most successful units of epidemiological research in Europe. The department has extensive experience from large-scale population-based epidemiological research using various designs and has gathered considerable experience in Internet-based epidemiological research.
MEB has a mixed computer environment based on more than 30 UNIX/Linux and Windows servers. The department has a Storage Area Network (SAN) with 3.5TB of raw disk, which can easily be expanded to 32TB of raw disk. Of the total staff of close to 200, there are 16 full professors of epidemiology, more than 20 biostatisticians (3 full professors, 3 lecturers) and programmers with extensive experience of epidemiologic studies.
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8. KULeuven - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Rega Institute for Medical Research, Belgium
Team Leader: Prof. Marc Van Ranst
Web Page: http://www.virology.be
Founded in 1425, K.U.Leuven is a Flemish University of Catholic signature with an international orientation. It has the legal statue of private institution. It transfers knowledge through high-quality interdisciplinary teaching. Its programmes integrate professional training into a broad ethical, cultural and social context of education. Rather than passing on mere factual knowledge, it promotes the skills of identifying, formulating and solving problems. It creates the necessary conditions for a stimulating educational experience. Special attention is paid to the steady evaluation of its teaching to enhance the student’s capacity for independent study, to provide intensive individual guidance and an adequate evaluation system, to ensure high didactic qualities of the teaching staff, and to stimulate the use of new teaching methods and technologies.
The laboratory of Clinical Virology is part of the Rega Institute for Medical Research. This institution is an interfacultary biomedical research institute that is part of the K.U.Leuven, consisting of departments of medicine and pharmacology. The laboratory of Clinical Virology is specialised in the molecular evolution of viruses like papillomaviruses, rotaviruses, RSV, hepatitis B viruses, hepatitis C viruses, coronaviruses and influenza viruses. In relation to viral evolution, we study the epidemiological spread of viruses in Belgium and Europe and this based on sample screening, questionnaires and data mining. Moreover, virus diagnosis and identification, together with the development of sequence-independent techniques for virus discovery and diagnosis form an important part of our research work.
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9. BIU - Bar Llan University, Israel
Team Leader: Prof. Shlomo Havlin
Web Page:
The MINERVA Center for the Physics of Mesoscopics, Fractals and Neural networks headed by Shlomo Havlin was established in 1995 and is part of the Department of Physics at Bar-Llan University. One of the main research activities of the Center are studies of dynamical processes and complex systems using fractals and synchronization methods. In particular, the Center had fundamental contributions to the analyses of physiological. ecological and climate signals, as well as in developing methods that lead to better understanding of complex networks. The Center has a fruitful collaboration since many years with the Institute for Theoretische Physics, II (University Giessen) and collaboration with the Department of Institute of Pneumology of the Hospital of the Philipps-University in Marburg in 1998.
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10. FBK - Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Team Leader: Stefano Merler
Web Page: http://www.fbk.eu/; http://www.mpba.fbk.eu
The Fondazione Bruno Kessler is a non-profit body with a public interest mission having private-law status and inheriting the history of Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC created in 1962 by the Autonomous Province of Trento). The total budget is currently about 34M Euros yearly. FBK is the Center for Scientific and Technological Research, a point of reference in the international scientific community and a hub for the development of technologies and applications with social and economical impact. The Center’s applied and basic research activities aims at resolving real-world problems and transferring technology to companies and public entities, also by founding 11 spinoff companies. The research staff at FBK consists of about 80 people on a permanent basis, and about 150 people on soft money. Half of FBK direct costs are covered by industrial contracts and European and National contracts. A substantial portion of FBK activities is in information technology. Other areas of activity are microsystems and applied physics. So far, over 70 European contracts have been carried on by FBK in many successful Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Framework projects, in some case with the role of coordinating partner.
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11. CREATE-NET - Center for REsearch And Telecommunication Experimentation for NETworked communities
Team Leader: Daniele Miorandi
Web Page: http://www.create-net.org; http://www.create-net.org/pervasive
CREATE-NET is a research center established in 2003 in Trento, Italy. The mission of the center is to convert talent and human capital into intellectual property and start ups for promoting European high-tech competitiveness. The institution is led by Prof. Imrich Chlamtac and pursues research and development activities in advanced communication and computing technologies. CREATE-NET supports its research activities through a Testbed based on an open environment principle, which provides distributed, operational, high-bandwidth telecommunications infrastructure for testing advanced technologies and services. CREATE-NET works closely with governments, universities, SMEs, large companies and communities worldwide alike, promoting European growth and exposing various layers of the global research world in Italy. In the frameworks of these collaborations CREATE-NET is involved in 12 European projects, 8 FP6-IST ones (3 as coordinator and 5 as partners) and 4 FP7-ICT ones. Funded projects by Italian Ministry of Foreign Affair and Research with leading institutions in the U.S., China and Israel have given CREATE-NET a respectable and competitive international name for itself. CREATE-NET is also leader in fostering scientific community through the organization and sponsorship of various international events. Currently, CREATE-NET is involved in more than 50 international conferences and workshops, in collaboration with IEEE, ACM, EU, ICST, IFIP and NSF. The 5 main Research Areas of CREATE-NET are: Pervasive, Security, Communication and Network Technologies, Multimedia Interaction and Smart Environment, OSCO (Open Distributed Systems for Communities and Business Organizations).
CREATE-NET will contribute to the EPIWORK project through Pervasive Computing & Communication Environments team. The Pervasive team, led by Dr. Daniele Miorandi, targets research in the field of pervasive computing and communication systems. The Pervasive team’s activities and research focus on designing methodologies and tools for enabling pervasive networked devices to interface with the environment to support context-aware services. This includes design of architectures and protocols for large-scale heterogeneous networked systems, as well as algorithmic solutions for enhancing robustness and reliability in fully distributed and mobile systems.
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12. FFCUL - Faculty of Sciences University of Lisbon
Team Leader: Mário J. Silva
Web Page: http://lasige.di.fc.ul.pt;
The Fundaçao da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FFCUL) is a private non-profit organization, created in 1993 , as an initiative of Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. FFCUL acts as the front institution for a Portuguese scientific collaboration of multiple research groups, with more than 200 ongoing projects. Many of these R&D activities are developed together with international teams and are funded both at national and European levels. Its main purposes are to promote research and technological development activities, provide qualified human resources training and offer consulting expertise and knowledge dissemination. FFCUL has a large experience regarding EC project development, being responsible for the management of around 30 ongoing FP6 projects. Examples of important projects include Transfer, Nearest, Hidenets, Crutial, TargetScreen2, Sensoria, Watch, Esonet and EuroCareCF. FFCUL will administrate the participation of the Large-Scale Informatics Systems Laboratory (LASIGE) and Center for Mathematics and Fundamental Applications (CMAF). LASIGE is a research unit of the Department of Informatics with research in Biomedical Informatics, Communication System Software and Middleware, Fault and Intrusion Tolerance in Open Distributed Systems, Global Computing, Human Computer Interaction and Multimedia, Information Management, Timeliness and Adaptation in Dependable Systems. LASIGE has approximately 90 collaborators, 27 of which hold a doctoral degree. Within LASIGE, the XLDB Group and their researchers of the Biomedical Informatics research line will be directly involved in EPIWORK. The group researches systems for data analyses, information integration and user access to large quantities of complex data from heterogeneous platforms. Current research activities span geographic information retrieval, text mining and natural language processing, web archiving and search, information visualization, and biomedical informatics. Current EU-funded projects include CRUTIAL, GORDA and HIDENETS.
CMAF is part of the Complexo Interdisciplinar of Lisbon University (CIUL), which exists as a research infrastructure for more than 30 years, becoming part of the University of Lisbon in 1992. It is a modern facility dedicated exclusively to the support of research and post-graduate training.
