[Population Modeling] Welcome to the Population Modeling working group Wiki

[Madhav Marathe]

Hello Colleagues

Wish you all a very happy new year. Am delighted to welcome you all to the new population modeling wiki and mailing list that we have
created as a part of the IMAG efforts. We need to thank Jacob Barhak for his efforts; it is fair to say that without his efforts we would not have
seen the mailing list come alive. Grace Peng and Stephanie Sabourin at NIH have been spearheading this effort for a long time and want to thank
them as well. 

Myself, Sergey and Jacob are currently serving as coordinators for this. We hope that in time others will take over the responsibilities.
Alison Galvani will also join soon.


Some bits of information:

1) Please visit the IMAG population working group wiki site. There is a lot of information on that site.
See: http://www.imagwiki.nibib.nih.gov/content/population-modeling-working-group. We will soon figure out how to harmonize the
wiki and the working group site.

2) There is a wikipedia entry that someone has created. It will be useful to update this site as well. 
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_model

3) There is ongoing discussion to draft a white paper on what one means by population modeling; Sergey and others have started this thread I believe.

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Per Jacob's request here is a short paragraph introducing our group (I believe the intent is for all participants to provide short introductions).

The Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL), is a part of the Virginia Bio-informatics Institute at Virginia Tech. I currently
serve as the director of NDSSL.   Kindly see  http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl &
http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl/people/people-profile/Madhav-Marathe 
for further details. 

The lab focuses on developing synthetic information environments to study large scale biological, information, social and technical (BIST) networks.
Models of populations are central to this endeavor. We are agnostic of specific populations -- we have worked with human populations, animal populations,
cells and wireless devices to name a few. The key aspects are: (i) developing realistic representations of populations as opposed
to ones that are modeled as simple random structures, (ii) populations are relational (e.g. people have an age) and dynamic, (iii) dynamics of
interested are obtained by composing local dynamics that capture interactions.

Four large bodies of work that we are involved in are: (i) science of networks, (ii) public health epidemiology and (iii) disaster resilence and (iv)
computational immunology. For e.g. the immunology work is funded under the NIH NIAID center called MIEP. As another example, 
the public health epidemiology work is supported by multiple organizations, including NIH NIGMS, DOD DTRA, NSF, IARPA and others.
Papers and details on the projects can be found on our web page (admittedly not well done and a bit out of date). I will be happy to provide
additional details.  See: http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl/ebola for description of our work that we are currently doing to support the Ebola response efforts.
It includes populations, papers and modeling results.


Another website worth looking at is http://ndssl.vbi.vt.edu/apps/. 
In particular look at SIV and Granite.

- SIV is a visual analytics tool to visualize synthetic populations. We have created a synthetic population for the entire US now and should have a 
version of large fraction of the globe by the end of the year. The resolution and fidelity ofcourse varies. (See http://ndssl.vbi.vt.edu/apps/siv/)
Synthetic populations and networks are a synthetic but realistic representation of the population of interest. 

- Granite is a web based system to analyze large networks. You can simply register and use the facility.  See http://ndssl.vbi.vt.edu/apps/cinet/.

Both are research products and as a result, they do go down on and off, we hope to make them stable in time.

Please do not hesitate to contact me (mmarathe at vbi.vt.edu) if you need additional details.

Madhav Marathe
Professor
Virginia Tech