Author Archive

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.

Since my move to the ISI Foundation in Torino, I have been busy setting up a couple of exciting projects. One of these projects is SocioPatterns. It involves active RFID tags which we use to sense social interactions, and real-time visualizations that represent those interactions.

After having spent close to three years at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) in Paris, I’m shifting gears and will join the Complex Networks unit of the Complex Systems Lagrange Laboratory at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Torino, Italy (locate ISI in Google Earth.)

I will be joining a top-notch team whose members routinely blend statistical physics and computer science in order to study the topology and behaviour of complex systems. My contribution will be to further extend the use of contemporary internet technologies such as collaboration-oriented socio-technical systems for conducting internet-based experiments in e.g. social dynamics.

What I plan to do in Torino could be described as a next step in the reintegration of my recent activities as a scientific researcher, and my earlier activities as a new-media artist/developer.

A perfect time, I figured, to start communicating on a more regular basis about these activities, hence this new blog-like website. You can subscribe to the accompanying low-volume RSS feed if you wish to be kept up-to-date.