[Population Modeling] Introduction

[Samarth Swarup]

Hi, I am Samarth Swarup. I am a research scientist at the Network 
Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab at Virginia Tech.

Our lab does population modeling in multiple contexts, including 
epidemiology and disaster resilience. Our approach is to construct 
large-scale data-driven simulations that integrate information from 
multiple sources to construct a realistic model of the population of a 
region. We call these synthetic information systems. Two recent examples 
of studies are below.

1. Disaster resilience:

We developed a simulation of the aftermath of a 10kT improvised nuclear 
detonation at ground level in the middle of Washington DC on a weekday 
morning. This simulation included 730,000 agents, and models of the 
transportation, communication, health, and power infrastructures. We 
modeled the expected behavior of individuals, including searching for 
family members, seeking shelter, seeking healthcare, evacuation, etc. We 
showed that relatively passive interventions like partially restoring 
communication as quickly as possible could have a significant effect on 
lives saved.

Planning and Response in the Aftermath of a Large Crisis: An Agent-based 
Informatics Framework
Christopher Barrett, Keith Bisset, Shridhar Chandan, Jiangzhuo Chen, 
Youngyun Chungbaek, Stephen Eubank, Yaman Evrenosoglu, Bryan Lewis, 
Kristian Lum, Achla Marathe, Madhav Marathe, Henning Mortveit, Nidhi 
Parikh, Arun Phadke, Jeffery Reed, Caitlin Rivers, Sudip Saha, Paula 
Stretz, Samarth Swarup, James Thorp, Anil Vullikanti, Dawen Xie, The 
Winter Simulation Conference, Washington DC, USA, Dec 8-11, 2013.
http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/swarup/papers/ndssl_wsc2013.pdf

Modeling Human Behavior in the Aftermath of a Hypothetical Improvised 
Nuclear Detonation
Nidhi Parikh, Samarth Swarup, Paula Stretz, Caitlin Rivers, Bryan Lewis, 
Madhav Marathe, Stephen Eubank, Christopher Barrett, Kristian Lum, and 
Youngyun Chungbaek, The Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous 
Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Saint Paul, MN, USA, May 2013.
http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/swarup/papers/parikh-et-al-aamas2013.pdf

2. Epidemiology:

In this study, we augmented an existing synthetic population of 
Washington DC with a population of transients (tourists, business 
travelers). Washington DC sees an average of 50,000 visitors on any 
given day, and these visitors go to highly trafficked areas of the city, 
such as around the National Mall. We simulated a flu epidemic in the 
city and showed that including transients in the model makes a 
significant difference. Further, we showed that implementing a 
location-specific intervention, such as encouraging healthy behaviors 
(covering your cough, using hand sanitizer, etc), in four major museums 
around the National Mall can have a significant impact on reducing the 
epidemic.

Modeling the Effect of Transient Populations on Epidemics in Washington DC
Nidhi Parikh, Mina Youssef, Samarth Swarup, and Stephen Eubank, 
Scientific Reports 3, Article number 3152, Nov 2013.
http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/swarup/papers/revised-Transients-SciRep.pdf



Best,
Samarth


Samarth Swarup
Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab,
Virginia Bioinformatics Institute,
Virginia Tech.


On 1/7/15 9:30 AM, Al Chrosny wrote:
> Hi, I am Al Chrosny, and I manage engineering team at TreeAge Software 
> Inc.
>
> My interest in population modeling is from perspective of tools and 
> methods. The healthcare economics is relatively new area for me, but I 
> find that I can bring many of my electrical engineering and computer 
> science experiences. Recently I have been working on comparison of 
> discrete event simulation methods and markov individual patient 
> simulation methods. Some preliminary results of the comparison were 
> presented at ISPOR conference in Dublin in 2013.  The poster and 
> materials can be found at:
>
> http://www.treeage.com/articles/markov-vs-discrete-event-simulation/
>
> Al
>