PhD Proposal: Large Scale Epidemiological Agent-based Models: Creating More Efficient Simulations and Dynamic Behaviors
Joy Kitson
Tuesday, December 10, 2024, 1:00-3:00 pm 
Abstract
Abstract:
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, a wide variety of modeling approaches have been employed to inform the decisions made by policymakers at various levels of government. In particular, agent-based models (ABMs), in which the behavior of individual agents within the modeled population is simulated directly, have proved effective at capturing the impacts of a range of public health interventions. However, ABMs are orders of magnitude more computationally intensive to run than conventional ordinary differential equations (ODE) based models. As a result, existing ABMs in this space are generally either (1) complex, small simulations (at most around a million agents) with a focus on epidemiological results rather than computational efficiency, or (2) simpler, large models where much of the complexity lies in the underlying datasets and the behavioral model of agents remains relatively simple (e.g. a sequence of top-down interventions determines behavior). In addition, the latter often have difficulty scaling efficiently to large core counts, and generally experiences significant performance degradation when simulating more complex interventions (e.g. contact tracing). With these limitations of existing simulations in mind, we set out to enable ABMs of infectious disease spread to efficiently scale to large populations and core counts while efficiently modeling a combination of top-down and bottom-up behaviors that are both complex and dynamic. There are two main directions involved in this work: (1) increasing the scalability of ABMs for large populations and (2) introducing more complex behavioral models into large-scale ABMs, particularly ones which dynamically evolve with the spread of the simulated disease.
Bio
Joy Kitson is a Computer Science PhD student in the Parallel Systems and Software Group at UMD, advised by Abhinav Bhatele, and completed her Bachelors degree at the University of Delaware in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in 2020. She studies how to best harness high performance computing resources to support simulations of infectious disease spread. She was selected as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow in 2021, and has interned at Livermore, Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos National Laboratories.
This talk is organized by Migo Gui