GOVERNMENT

Have you ever shared photos or videos using Flickr or YouTube? Alessandro Vespignani, professor in the Indiana University School of Informatics, says these types of content-sharing sites are, in some sense, similar to a cutting-edge research toolset that he and two IU faculty colleagues are developing. EpiC -- Epidemics Cyber infrastructure -- is a computational infrastructure supporting plug-and-play datasets, algorithms and visualization components used in "biological and social contagion research." Vespignani, teaming up with Katy Borner, associate professor in the IU School of Library and Information Science, and Steven J. Sherman, Chancellor's Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, has been awarded $1.2 million by the National Institutes of Health to design, deploy and maintain EpiC. "The study of epidemics is crucial for the understanding, prediction and prevention of many phenomena affecting public health, such as infectious diseases, alcohol use and smoking habits," said Vespignani. "EpiC will provide improvement and facilitation of the multi-scale analysis of social data and their integration in systems dynamic modeling, agent-based modeling, and other simulation techniques for epidemic processes. Vespignani explained that progress in this area is difficult because the datasets and processes are often quite complex and require simultaneous analysis from different locations. EpiC, an open-source toolset, will allow for the easy exchange, combination and application of data analysis capabilities originating from very different areas of research. In other words, a kind of 'scholarly marketplace' for information sharing. Alessandro Vespignani "Instead of sharing images or movies, scholars will use EpiC to share datasets, algorithms and any other items relevant to the study of epidemics," said Vespignani. The most significant value of EpiC will be the ability for researchers to handle, integrate and share large-scale data sets among groups without having to reinvent the wheel, added Vespignani. EpiC will provide policy makers and other communities who are not working in the development of such tools a cutting-edge computational approach to the modeling of contagion processes, added Vespignani.