ISI Foundation

🔵 Che fare? Webfare! Umanesimo e Tecnologia per Tempi Difficili 📅 22 maggio 2025 | 🕤 ore 9:30 📍 Aula Magna Cavallerizza Reale, Torino Domani Ciro Cattuto, ISI Foundation Scientific Director, parteciperà alla giornata di studi "Che fare? Webfare!", dedicata al ruolo dei dati e dell'AI nella costruzione di un nuovo welfare digitale, inclusivo e umano. 🕚 Alle ore 11:00 interverrà nella sessione "Società", per riflettere sul ruolo delle istituzioni come produttori e custodi di dati e sulle opportunità per trasformarli in valore per la collettività. Un'occasione di dialogo tra ricerca, impresa e istituzioni su società, educazione, lavoro e sicurezza nell'era digitale. Università degli Studi di Torino

How do socioeconomic factors shape protective behaviors and contact patterns years after the COVID-19 pandemic? New paper in PLOS Computational Biology. Key findings: - Employment status and age are central to differences in both protective behaviors (like mask-wearing and vaccination) and contact patterns, while education level plays a lesser role. - Unemployed individuals were more likely to adopt non-pharmaceutical interventions such as mask-wearing and social distancing, but less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19. - Younger adults reported more social contacts, especially in work and leisure contexts, which may impact transmission dynamics. - City size and geographic region also contributed to variations, particularly in perceptions of pandemic impact and in patterns of contact. The results underline the need for epidemic models and public health strategies that account for persistent socioeconomic differences. Laetitia Gauvin ISI Foundation DTU Compute Full open access article: https://lnkd.in/dv8Xey4U

How could maternal vaccination and long‑acting monoclonal antibodies for newborns reduce RSV hospitalisations across Europe? European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) with support from the EU‑SMIND consortium, is launching the 2025/26 RSV scenario round via #RespiCompass, our collaborative modelling platform. This new round will explore the potential impact of these preventive strategies and help inform public health decisions across Europe. Want to contribute to this work? 🗓 Submission deadline: 1 December 2025 📧 Contact: rsv-respicompass@isi.it 🔗 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gMH3Xt6F #Modelling #Prevention #PublicHealth #ECDC

📢 Call for Participants – RespiCompass RSV Scenario Round 2025/26 The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), together with the EU-SMIND consortium, is launching the 2025/26 RSV scenario round through RespiCompass, ECDC’s official collaborative modelling platform. This round focuses on evaluating the potential impact of maternal vaccination and long-acting monoclonal antibodies for newborn protection across the EU/EEA, targeting RSV-related hospitalisations and infections. 🗓️ Submission deadline: December 1, 2025 📩 Interested in joining? Reach out at rsv-respicompass@isi.it RSV is a leading cause of respiratory hospitalisations in young children in Europe. The path toward effective immunisation has been long and complex, but with new vaccines and monoclonal antibodies now authorised in the EU, countries finally have concrete options to protect infants. As several EU/EEA countries consider introducing these interventions, this scenario round provides a structured opportunity to generate policy-relevant modelling evidence. Each scenario includes harmonised assumptions, realistic coverage levels, and country-specific calibration targets. If your team works on infectious disease modelling, health economic evaluation, or public health policy assessment, we encourage you to get involved. 🔗 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/d3B3qZpD

📌 𝗦𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲! We're proud to welcome Kyriaki Kalimeri, Researcher at ISI Foundation, as a keynote speaker at our Computational Social Science Satellite, taking place during the Conference on Complex Systems 2025! Kyriaki aims to drive positive change through her research, and such dedication brought her to the role of Senior Research Consultant at UNICEF. We can’t wait to hear from her. This is a session you’ll want to catch, whether you're there for the whole conference or just this session. 📍𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: University of Siena, Italy 📅 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻: September 4 🔗 𝗖𝗦𝗦@𝗖𝗖𝗦: https://lnkd.in/dk2quYyJ 🔗 𝗖𝗖𝗦'𝟮𝟱: https://lnkd.in/dY6GCRRH Come for the science, stay for the inspiration — and bring your questions! #ComputationalSocialScience #CCS2025 ISI Foundation UNICEF

Comparative analysis of behavioral feedback models for epidemic forecasting" https://lnkd.in/epmHQF7N How should we model the feedback between human behavior and infectious disease spread? In this new work we systematically compare data-driven vs. analytical behavioral models across nine locations during the first wave of COVID-19. We test each model on two tasks: retrospective fitting and out-of-sample forecasting, evaluating how well each captures the dynamics shaped by behavioral responses. Key message: Analytical models that explicitly represent behavioral feedback can often match or outperform models using real-world mobility data. The work offers guidance for selecting and designing behavioral epidemic models under varying data constraints. Shout-out to Nicola Perra and Nicolò Gozzi

Back in December 2020, with Paolo Bajardi and Nicolò Gozzi, we wondered what could happen if the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines would bring some people to relax their adherence to social distancing measures (i.e., behavioural relaxation). We developed and explored a few theoretical models showing the potential negative effects of behavioural relaxation in terms of deaths and cases (see https://lnkd.in/emRkWmKb). Since then several surveys have collected data across different countries highlighting that indeed the arrival of vaccines induced some behavioural relaxation. However, others provided limited support for this phenomenon, especially during the initial phases of the vaccine rollout. In this new PloS Computational Biology paper, co-authored with Yuhan Li and Nicolò Gozzi, we aimed to quantify the extent of behavioural relaxation induced by the start of vaccination campaigns and estimate their potential impact on deaths. We developed a series of stochastic compartmental epidemic models, integrating vaccinations, variants of concern, age-structure, social distancing, and individuals’ behavioural relaxation linked to vaccines. We found that models including behavioural relaxation lead to estimates that are closer to real data. However, the improvements are limited and gains are generally offset by models’ increased complexity. In other words, we do not find clear signs of behavioural relaxation induced by COVID-19 vaccines, at least on deaths. Even more, our results suggest that if this phenomenon occurred, it generally involved only a minority of the population. The paper contributes to the retrospective validation of epidemic models developed amid the COVID-19 Pandemic and underscores one of the critical issues of behavioural modelling: non-identifiability of complex social mechanisms. Details: https://lnkd.in/eVcCBDgg

🧬 Modeling Infectious Disease Outbreaks Using Genomic Data 📍 Faculty of Science, Mahidol University, Bangkok 🗓 June 30 – July 4, 2025 The international workshop on "Modeling Infectious Disease Outbreaks Using Genomic Data" is taking place from today June 30 to July 4, 2025, at the Faculty of Science, Mahidol University in Bangkok. Researchers from the ISI Foundation — Daniela Paolotti, Nicolò Gozzi, Mattia Mazzoli, and Ciro Cattuto (Scientific Director) — will lead this dynamic and collaborative event, organized within the framework of the Horizon Europe Verdi Project(https://verdiproject.org/). 🔍 About the Workshop This 5-day intensive program offers the opportunity to explore how genomic and epidemiological data can be integrated to model and better understand the spread of infectious diseases. The workshop includes: *Public lectures *Hands-on tutorials *Advanced brainstorming sessions It is designed to foster international scientific exchange, promote collaborative research, and strengthen modeling capabilities in the field of public health. 📚 Topics Covered *Epidemiological data analysis and real-world challenges *Compartmental and metapopulation models *Integration of spatial and genomic data *High-resolution contact networks *Python-based modeling using Epydemix