The Epidemic Planet: interactively visualize and compare epidemic  simulations.

Within the  WP4 Research activity, “Computational Modeling Platform”, in addiction to the main outreach addressed to the scientific community, a visualization application dedicated to the dissemination to a non academic audience has been developed.

The application, which is called The Epidemic Planet, displays the evolution of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and enables its users to interactively compare and learn about the effect of various intervention scenarios.

The Epidemic Planet setup consists of two screens:

i) a touch screen used to choose the starting conditions, and

ii) a visualization screen used to display the output of computer simulations performed using the GLEaM model.

Two different simulations are shown simultaneously.

For each simulation users can select the following options:

• the geographic origin for the disease, between La Gloria, Mexico, where the pandemic actually originated, and a major European city like Barcelona, Spain;
• the contagiousness of the disease, mild or severe (which corresponds to different values of the reproductive number);
• whether to apply travel restrictions or not, reducing the global airline transportation by a 75% factor;
• whether to suppose a worldwide vaccination campaign or not and, if yes, whether to start it in August or in November.

The dynamical maps show the time evolution of the epidemic for the selected scenarios allowing the users to qualitatively compare them. Visualization maps are provided both for the whole planet and for each continent.

The Epidemic Planet application has been shown in various events:

• at the “INFECTIOUS“ Science exhibition in the Science Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, running from April 17 to July 17, 2009
• at the “Meet the Medics and Vets” event during the 22nd edition of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, running from April 3 to 17, 2010
• within the CosmoCaixa Mobìl- Technorevolucion travelling exhibition in Barcelona, Spain
• in the Exhibition hall of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC10), New Orleans, Louisiana (US), from November 13th to 19th.

During the third period it has been shown at the FET Flagship Pilots Midterm Conference held in Warsaw on November 25^th 2011: http://www.futurict.eu/event/fet-flagships-pilots-midterm-conference

http://www.futurict.eu/sites/default/files/docs/newsletters/FuturICT%20Warsaw%2025%20Nov%202011%20%28Opening%20Presentation%202%29.pdf

The Epidemic Planet was also on show from October 2010, throughout 2011 in 28 locations  in Spain with the exhibition ExpoCaixa Tecnorevolución (http://www.arteenlared.com/archivo/2010/expocaixa-tecnorevolucion-una-exposicion-para-descubrir-los-avances-en-tecnologias-convergentes.html ) and Cosmocaixa ¡Epidemia! (http://www.abc.es/agencias/noticia.asp?noticia=944430).

Here are some more links from media reporting about the event:

http://obrasocial.lacaixa.es/ambitos/exposiciones/tecnorevolucion4_es.html

The itinerant event was mainly focusing around an interactive exhibition that would invite visitors to discover some technology advances and how they affected the everyday life. In the first part of the exhibition, four different areas were covered: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and communication and cognitive science.

In the second part, the most interactive one, visitors could experience first hand these technologies. The Epidemic Planet was included in this section and was meant to show to the public the propagation of a virus on a global scale and how travels and human mobility in general can affect it.