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$1.2 million NIH project will help track and predict epidemics

The National Institutes of Health has given $1.2 million to Indiana University researchers to build the ultimate international epidemic research tool. Principle investigators Katy Börner, Steven J. Sherman and Alessandro Vespignani will oversee the project, EpiC, which they hope will make the sharing and re-using of epidemics datasets and algorithms as easy as sharing videos via YouTube. The three researchers come from three distinct areas of the campus -- the School of Library and Information Science, the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Informatics, respectively. Additional members of the evolving team are IU researchers Duygu Balcan, Weixia Huang and Bruce W. Herr.

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Advances in Artificial Life

New book with the latest advances in Artificial Life. This book, co-edited by Prof. Luis M. Rocha, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 2007. The 125 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers are organized in topical sections on conceptual articles, morphogenesis and development, robotics and autonomous agents, evolutionary computation and theory, cellular automata, models of biological systems and their applications, ant colony and swarm systems, evolution of communication, simulation of social interactions, self-replication, artificial chemistry, and posters.More information from the publisher's site.Also related is a similar MIT Press volume co-edited by several members of the Complex Systems Group containing the proceedings of the Artificial Life X conference.

IU team has pulse on pandemic preparation

An Indiana University School of Informatics-led team of researchers have developed a mathematical model that can predict the spread and severity of a worldwide flu outbreak, giving health and public safety officials a leg up on where to dedicate their resources. Their report, published in the journal PLoS Medicine, describes several scenarios of flu virus pandemics and how best to contain them. The researchers show that strict travel restrictions would do little if anything to prevent the flu from spreading throughout the globe. Other measures could therefore be crucial, but it is likely that only a few countries will be able to stockpile supplies of drugs active against the virus. In these circumstances, compared with a 'selfish strategy' in which countries use their antiviral drugs only within their borders, limited worldwide sharing of antiviral drugs would slow down the spread of a flu virus by many months, to the benefit of both drug donors and recipients. Marion County Health Department and Health Services at Eli Lilly and Co. comment on that.. More press and figures....

Mathematical models add more options for life sciences, cancer researchers

The use of mathematical modeling to better understand the origin and progression of life systems is the subject of American Scientist cover article Multiscale Modeling in Biology featuring the work of Prof. Santiago Schnell. A related paper authored by Schnell is ranked first among the Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling most viewed articles of all time. This is a list of the most frequently accessed articles in the history of the journal, compiled using online access statistics of the publisher BioMedCentral. The article A multiscale mathematical model of cancer, and its use in analyzing irradiation therapies was coauthored with Benjamin Ribba and Thierry Colin, and appeared in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 3:7 (2006). More...

Researchers throttle notion of search engine dominance

Search engines are not biased towards well-known Web sites. In fact, they actually produce an egalitarian effect as to where traffic is directed, say researchers at the Indiana University School of Informatics. Their study, Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias, appears in the Aug. 7-11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and challenges the “Googlearchy” theory – the perception that search engines push Web traffic toward popular sites, thus creating a monopoly over lesser-known sites. More...

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