Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Epidemics on networks: Thresholds and control strategies

Ayalvadi Ganesh

School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the contact process or SIS epidemic on an arbitrary network, and present upper and lower bounds on the epidemic lifetime. These bounds will imply an epidemic threshold on certain commonly used models of random graphs.

The second part of the talk will focus on strategies for controlling epidemics by allocating curing rates to nodes subject to a budget constraint. We will show that a simple static policy of allocating resources in proportion to node degree is within a constant factor of optimal.