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HomeEvents and SeminarsSeminars7/8/19: Philip E. Paré

ECE Departmental Seminar

Virus Spread over Networks

Dr. Philip E. Paré
KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Monday, 7/8/19, 11:00am
Light Engineering 250

Abstract: The study of epidemic processes has been a topic of interest for many years over a wide range of areas, including computer science, mathematical systems, biology, physics, social sciences, and economics.  More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of epidemic processes focused on the spread of viruses over networks, motivated not only by security threats posed by computer viruses, but also recent devastating outbreaks of infectious diseases and the rapid spread of opinions over social networks.  Up to this point these network-dependent spread models have not been validated by real data.

In this talk, we analyze a mathematical model for network-dependent spread and use that analysis to identify the healing and infection parameters of the model. We apply these ideas, employing John Snow's seminal work on cholera epidemics in London in the 1850's, to validate the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model. The validation results are surprisingly good, capturing the behavior of the cholera epidemic from John Snow's 1854 dataset quite well.
We conclude by briefly highlighting extensive analysis and algorithm design results we have obtained for time-varying and multi-layered networks, and finally discuss various directions for compelling future work.

Bio: Philip E. Paré received his B.S. in mathematics with University Honors and his M.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 2012 and 2014, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana, IL in 2018. He is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Decision and Control Systems in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Philip was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Robert T. Chien Memorial Award for excellence in research from the UIUC ECE Department and named a 2017-2018 UIUC College of Engineering Mavis Future Faculty Fellow. His research interests include the modeling, control, and security of dynamic networked systems, biological systems, and time--varying systems.