Well, it has to be good for something… People sometimes aren’t aware just how much computers influence their lives. They’ve used the internet and mobile phones, seen computer-generated imagery in cinemas, and perhaps realised how much date is being sensed around them. But there are enormous applications for computers in science, arts, and medicine. Earlier today I did an introductory lecture on using computers to study disease epidemics:

Com­pu­ta­tional epi­demi­ology is the use of math­em­at­ical and com­pu­ta­tional tech­niques to model how dis­eases spread. This is import­ant for answer­ing a num­ber of ques­tions. How infec­tious are dif­fer­ent dis­eases? Why are dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tions affected dif­fer­ently? How do dif­fer­ent treat­ment regimes work? Is quar­ant­ine effect­ive? We can address these sorts of ques­tions using a range of dif­fer­ent tech­niques, ran­ging from dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions (cal­cu­lus) for simple cases through to com­plex net­works and high-performance sim­u­la­tion for com­plex case — and pos­sibly even mod­el­ling real dis­eases in real-world geo­graph­ies in real time. This lec­ture is an inter­act­ive intro­duc­tion to these ideas. We’ll explore how dis­eases spread; con­duct an exper­i­ment where we infect each other (kind of); and then see how dif­fer­ent aspects of com­puter sci­ence help us to explore dis­eases and their treatment.

The slides and other material are available here. I’ve included the slides, and an animation of a simulated epidemic running through a population of people. I’ve also included an IPython notebook describing some of the mathematics needed and containing all the code I used to generate the graphs and animation from the talk, which might be handy for anyone wanting to explore this area more thoroughly.