The events of our recent history have shown that our battle against infectious diseases still faces enormous challenges, notwithstanding the dramatic progresses achieved in medicine and science. New infections continue to (re-)emerge in the World or move to previously unaffected regions (e.g. Zika virus), spreading rapidly into the population and causing serious concerns, considerable health impacts and potentially large economic losses. Our modern, fast, mobile and connected society is highly vulnerable to such phenomena. Transportation systems keep shrinking distances and increasing travel volumes, and urban areas become increasingly denser. Such increased mobility, mixing and interactions facilitate the spread of infectious diseases, raising major public health concerns. Also, the increasing role of social media favor the formation of ecosystems that contribute to the rapid spread of both true and false information about infections-related subjects (e.g., vaccination) that may alter individuals behavior in response to an outbreak.
Our technological advantage nowadays is the availability of a large set of tools and methods to characterize in detail the host population, its demographics, interactions and mobility patterns, allowing us to achieve a fundamental and comprehensive understanding of the disease epidemic and to provide critical information for its prediction, prevention and control.
This is the fifth edition of a series of satellite meetings within the Conference of Complex Systems (ECCS2012, ECCS2013, ECCS2014, CCS15). The meeting will focus on the above challenges in a fully interdisciplinary fashion, bringing together researchers from a broad range of disciplines such as physics, mathematics, biology, epidemiology, human and veterinary medicine, computer science, information technologies and social sciences.
Particular attention will be devoted to the following (non-exhaustive) list of topics:
The program has been updated following communication by CCS Main Organization, please check the updated version.
The meeting will take place in Room C.
Abstract submission deadline: June 12, 2016.
Notification to authors: no later than June 29, 2016.