Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic upended our societies and re-shaped the way we go about our day-to-day lives—from how we work and interact to the way we buy

groceries and attend school. In this talk, I will present a series of studies quantifying how our behavior, mobility patterns, and social networks shaped and were shap

ed by COVID-19. Leveraging global data sets that represent billions of people, I will show how myriad factors interacted to structure the course of the pandemic.

Then, by connecting the mathematics of epidemics to classical theory from ecology, I will outline a strategy for preventing future outbreaks from growing into pandemics. Finally, using the lessons learned from COVID-19, I discuss how we might balance the ethical and privacy considerations around high-resolution data with their critical role in responding to epidemics.

About the Speaker

Samuel V. Scarpino, PhD, is the director of AI + life sciences at Northeastern University and a professor of the practice in health and computer sciences. He holds appointments in Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI and Network Science Institute. In recognition for his contributions to complex systems science, he was named a fellow of the ISI Foundation in 2017, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute in 2020, and an external faculty member at the Vermont Complex System Center in 2021. Prior to joining Northeastern, Scarpino was the vice president of pathogen surveillance at The Rockefeller Foundation, chief strategy officer at Dhar

ma Platform (a social impact, technology startup),and co-founded a data science initiative called Global.health, which was backed by Google and The Rockefeller

Foundation. Scarpino’s research has been published in journals such as Nature, Science, The Lancet Global Health, Nature Medicine, PNAS, Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Nature Physics. The New York Times, Wired, the Boston Globe, National Geographic, and numerous other venues have covered his work. He earned his doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and was Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow from 2013 – 2016.

Registration link

https://iu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kj-cg_saTmi4oQERGNX8Lg#/registration