This week’s edition of Science magazine contains this article by John Bohannon about our SocioPatterns experiment at the Infectious exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin.

Spreading The Flu, Science Magazine, May 22, 2009
This is another interview with yours truly recorded during the hectic opening of the Infectious exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin. This interview is about the Epidemic Planet visualization application I developed in the context of the GLEaMviz project.
This is an interview with Ciro and myself on our deployment of SocioPatterns at the Infectious exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. Notice Ciro’s dramaticity and my overt enthusiasm 😉
Two weeks ago we deployed our most recent SocioPatterns experiment at the Infectious exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. For this particular deployment we added a new feature to the RFID tags’ firmware that enables us to run live simulations on the spreading of infections among the tag wearing visitors of the exhibition.

All visitors are given a SocioPatterns tag.
We were particularly interested in doing so because the nature of the exhibition setting, i.e. new visitors continuously enter, stay a while and then leave the exhibition, is an interesting approximation of the kind of high-flow setting encountered in e.g. train stations and air-ports. It should be clear that it would be extremely difficult to collect the same kind of highly detailed data on the social interactions and infectious spreading in actual train stations or airports.
So far close to ten thousand visitors have visited the exhibition and we have collected detailed data on their social interactions and the spreading of the simulated infection. It goes without saying that we are very exited about this.
Learn more about this deployment on this blog post on SocioPatterns.org.
Another project I have been involved in at ISI is the GLEaMviz project, in which I’m primarily dealing with visualization and dissemination. I have for instance developed the Epidemic Planet visualization currently on display at the Infectious exhibition in the Trinity College Science Gallery in Dublin. You can read a bit more about this exhibit on this blog post. This visualization is a multi-window Adobe Air app. The movies are pre-rended in another Adobe Air app, which is the actual GLEaMviz app.
The GLEaMviz app provides a multi-scale temporal visualization of the data produced by the GLEaM modeling system. The app provides an interactive interfacing mode and can also export frames, one for each timestep, which can then be compiled in a movie. I plan to provide more info, screenshots, and movies, but I’m currently very busy with the Mexican Flu spread projections reporting on gleamviz.org.