A Framework for Modeling Complex Human Behaviors in Epidemic Simulations

Speaker: Samarth Swarup

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of understanding the role of human behavior in the spread of infectious diseases. Behaviors such as mask-wearing, social distancing, and choosing to get vaccinated are driven by multiple social processes such as normative reasoning, risk perception, and attitudes. In ongoing work, he have been building a platform that can use the belief-desire-intention (BDI) agent paradigm together with large-scale agent-based simulations of epidemics to allow modeling such social phenomena. He will describe this new simulation platform and show an initial attempt at building a COVID-19 simulation with BDI agents that allows scaling up to ~8 million agents.

Bio: Samarth Swarup is a research associate professor in the Network Systems Science and Advanced Computing division. Swarup earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include: Resilience and Sustainability - Simulation methods for urban and environmental modeling, disaster response, epidemic mitigation and prevention; Computational Social Science - Model-based informatics, racial and economic disparities, social media, big data; Simulation Analytics - Social networks and social contagion, causality and sense-making in simulations, AI and machine learning.

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