Grant supports game software for virtual disease outbreak

Computer scientists and statisticians at Colorado State University have received a $2.04 million Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate grant to design a computer software program that will virtually represent the effects of disease outbreak, according to a recent press release.

“When a disease breaks out, you need to know — how severe is it? How long will it last? How many field personnel do you need? What are the economic consequences? How will commodity prices be affected? What will happen if you start vaccinating,” researcher Shrideep Pallickara, PhD, associate professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences at Colorado State, said in the release.

These questions currently are answered by outbreak specialists who consider several scenarios, adjusting for numerous variables such as disease biology and virulence, before determining an action plan.

“In these cases, sometimes hours elapse between modifying your scenario, running it, and getting your response back,” Pallickara said in the release. “What we do instead is, given a national scale outbreak scenario, we generate 100,000 variants, run them in a computing cloud that generates several billion files, and then do the analytics on all this data.”

That way when a user modifies a plan, the players will already know what the outcome will be, Pallickara said.

A multiplayer version of the game called “Symphony” will allow epidemiologists and state and federal officials to plan an outbreak together in real-time and to understand how decisions made by policymakers, field agents and veterinarians will affect one another. A single player version, “Sonata,” will be tested first.

The game crunches response time from hours or days to a matter of milliseconds; and researchers said that concepts learned during outbreak planning will “stick” better in a game playing environment.