Epidemic Planet

Project lifetime: since 2009

Role: design and implementation

Institutes: ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy - MoBS Lab at Northeastern University, Boston, USA

In collaboration with:

Prof. Alessandro Vespignani, Vittoria Colizza, Marco Quaggiotto, José Ramasco, Duygu Balcan, Paolo Bajardi, Bruno Gonçalves, Hao Hu, Chiara Poletto, Michele Tizzoni, Nicola Perra, and Daniela Paolotti

Page last updated: August 26, 2012

The Epidemic Planet is an installation for scientific exhibitions meant to disseminate the long-running research on the computational modeling of epidemics at the Computational Epidemiology Lab at the ISI Foundation (Turin, Italy) and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN, USA) under the direction of Alessandro Vespignani and Vittoria Colizza. The exhibit aims to enable its users to interactively compare and learn about the effect of a number of intervention scenarios on a pandemic, simulated using GLEaM, the unique global epidemic and mobility model, and visualized using the GLEaMviz visualization.

The Epidemic Planet was first displayed at the three-month INFECTIOUS exhibition in the Science Gallery at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The following pictures show this exhibit which consists of a large screen that shows an animation of the global spreading of the epidemic, accompanied by a smaller touch-screen panel that enables the visitor to select one of the many scenarios on offer.

The Epidemic Planet exhibit as it was deployed during the spring of 2009 in the Science Gallery.

Epidemic Planet at CosmoCaixa Barcelona, 2012-2014

An updated version of the Epidemic Planet exhibit is currently shown in the Epidèmia show in the CosmoCaixa science museum in Barcelona.

Sample of the side-by-side maps with the animated pandemic spread shown in the Epidemic Planet exhibit.

The touch-screen interface of the Epidemic Planet exhibit. The visitors can use this interface to select the epidemic scenarios to compare.

The entrance of the Epidèmia show.

Exhibitions

The Epidemic Planet exhibit has been shown at the following events:

INFECTIOUS, an ArtScience exhibition at the Science Gallery. April 17 – July 17, 2009, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Edinburgh International Science Festival, as part of the Meet the Medics and Vets event. April 3–17, 2010, Edinburgh, UK.
Science beyond Fiction: an Excursion into Future and Emerging Technologies, as part of the EPIWORK project showcase. April 20, 2010, European Parliament, Strasbourg, France.
CosmoCaixa Mòbil - Tecnorevolución, a traveling exhibition by Cosmo Caixa, fall 2010, Spain.
International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC10). November 13–19, 2010, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. The exhibit was hosted in the Exhibition hall, at the booth of the Indiana University, partner of the GLEaMviz project.
Epidèmia! exhibition, 2012-2013, CosmoCaixa Science Museum, Barcelona, Spain
Epidèmia! exhibition, 2013-2014, CosmoCaixa Science Museum, Madrid, Spain

More information:

gleamviz.org - the GLEaMviz project site
GLEaMviz at INFECTIOUS, Science Gallery, Dublin