Invited workshop: estimating contact networks from data

When: April 18-20, 2007

Where: 510 Mueller Lab, University Park (map)

Background and aims

Network approaches play an increasingly prominent role in efforts to understand disease transmission. How then, do we estimate network structures that are relevant to real disease-host systems?

This workshop will address this question by bringing together:

Theoreticians working on statistical properties and estimation of contact or social networks
Empiricists working on host social interactions, contact tracing and pathogen molecular evolution

Our goals are:

To identify novel methods for infering network structure from available data (where necessary, integrating diverse data types)
To establish collaborations between empiricists and theoreticians to tackle specific systems, and to set priorities for future work to enable network estimation
To produce a review article on empirical estimation of networks in infectious disease research, proposing a framework for the problem and describing the "state of the art" and future priorities

Agenda

Weds, April 18

Talks by a variety of speakers, aimed at establishing a unified vocabulary, reviewing existing methods, and identifying systems and questions of particular interest to field biologists and network scientists.

Thurs, April 19

Working groups to discuss technical aspects of network modeling and inference.

Fri, April 20