Homophily and Isolation during a Pandemic

The difficulties of doing research on epidemic spreading in Covid time

Hi Everybody,

NetPLACE here! We had our first seminar on Thursday, April 7th 2022.

Our first speaker was Abbas K. Rizi from Aalto University (Finland) who talked about his first project "Herd Immunity and Epidemic Size in Networks with Vaccination Homophily” (here is the record of the talk and here are the slides); he studied how the herd immunity threshold and the expected epidemic size depend on homophily with respect to vaccine adoption. The main result was that the presence of homophily considerably increases the critical vaccine coverage needed for herd immunity and that strong homophily can push the threshold out of reach.

In the second part of the talk, dedicated to difficulties in doing research, Abbas described the troubles he encountered in switching from a Physics department to a Computer Science one. Here, indeed, people used to have a different vocabulary and different approaches. In fact, we all know, in the complex system community, that it becomes necessary at some point to understand and communicate with colleagues from different disciplines - and the need is the mother of invention.

So Abbas, who needed to learn how to optimize his code and acquire more computational skills, found the Aalto Scientific Computing webpage, which provided him with a series of crash courses on some of these topics. Websites like this are a priceless resource for young researchers, so if you know of other similar projects, please let us know or share them directly on the slack channel!

All these difficulties were worsened by the pandemic that caused the lack of communication and exchange between people, forcing us to find another way to do networking. That’s why NetPLACE was born: to create a friendly environment where young researchers can share their knowledge and help each other overcome their difficulties. The pandemic taught us that we need this kind of exchange, NetPLACE is trying to make this possible on a larger scale.

And what about you?

Have you ever had problems dealing with a topic outside your field?