A new paper has just been published in PLoS ONE, on the properties of contact patterns between children in a primary school. Schools are epidemiologically important environments, and access to empirical contact patterns can empower modeling efforts as well as design strategies for containing the spread of infectious diseases. The paper reports on our first large-scale deployment in a school environment.

A new study of ours has been published in BMC Medicine, with a commentary by Sally Blower and Myong-Hyun Go. In this paper we simulated a SEIR process on the dynamical network of human proximity recorded through the  SocioPatterns sensing platform. We report on the implications of using high-resolution dynamic social network data on modeling epidemic processes.

A new paper published in Ad Hoc Networks reports on our investigation of data diffusion on ad hoc networks considering a real-world dynamical network of human proximity obtained with the SocioPatterns sensing platform. In this paper, we propose a new way of measuring delivery times of messages which allows us to deal with non-stationary situations in ad hoc networks and to obtain a robust characterization of data dissemination. This new approach is useful to set constraints for generic processes of data dissemination, as well as to validate established models of human mobility and proximity that are frequently used to simulate realistic behaviors.

Several results from the SocioPatterns project were presented at the NetSci2011 conference in Budapest, Hungary.

Ciro Cattuto reported on simulations of realistic epidemic spreading phenomena using data from a SocioPatterns deployment. These results will soon appear in BMC Medicine.

Alain Barrat presented the results of our paper What’s in a crowd? Analysis of face-to-face behavioral networks published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (2011).

Anna Machens discussed the interplay between the timescales of evolution of a dynamical network and the timescales of dynamical process taking place on the network.

Wouter Van den Broeck discussed the making of SIXTY-NINE DAYS OF CLOSE ENCOUNTERS AT THE SCIENCE GALLERY in Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks, the 2nd Leonardo satellite symposium.

On April 18h, a workshop organized by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine explored the state of the art on Social Contacts and Mixing Patterns in Epidemiology, focusing on measurement techniques and field experiences. Ciro Cattuto was invited to give a talk on the experience of the SocioPatterns project in measuring dynamical networks of human contact. Thanks to Ken Eames and John Edmunds for a very stimulating meeting!