Applied Math Colloquium - Friday, Nov. 6, 2009
David Hiebeler, University of Maine
3:30 PM at 655 Rhodes Hall
Hosted by R. Durrett
Title: Modeling Outbreaks in Structured Populations and the Internet
Abstract:
Many people opt out of receiving preventative vaccines for various diseases, for a variety of reasons. Because these individuals are not randomly distributed throughout populations, even if an apparently
high enough proportion of individuals are vaccinated to convey herd immunity, "hot spots" of unvaccinated individuals may still exist and pose a risk to others.
My students and I are using various lattice-structured and household-structured (aka patch) models to explore how spatial heterogeneity influences dynamics in population ecological and epidemiological systems.
These models are also applicable to studying the spread of malicious software (Internet worms, somewhat similar to computer viruses) through networks. Such worms now regularly use biologically-inspired mixed dispersal strategies. This past summer, I worked with a high-school student to build an epidemiological simulation model of the entire Internet (4.29 billion hosts) efficient enough to run on an ordinary desktop computer. We've incorporated measurements of heterogeneity from the actual Internet into the model, to begin
exploring various dispersal strategies of worms.
Bio: After doing an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Rensselaer and then spending some time working at Thinking Machines Corporation and the Santa Fe Institute, David Hiebeler received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell in 2001. He worked briefly as a lecturer in the Department of BSCB at Cornell, and has been a faculty member at the University of Maine since 2002.