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Human behavior is a dynamic process that evolves with experience. Understanding the evolution of individual's risk propensity is critical to design public health interventions to propitiate the adoption of better biosecurity protocols and…

Policymakers commonly employ non-pharmaceutical interventions to manage the scale and severity of pandemics. Of non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing policies -- designed to reduce person-to-person pathogenic spread -- have…

We study the spread of a novel state in a network, in the presence of an exogenous control. The considered controlled evolutionary dynamics is a non-homogeneous Markov process that describes the evolution of the states of all nodes in the…

Epidemiological models with constant parameters may not capture satisfactory infection patterns in the presence of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical mitigation measures during a pandemic, since infectiousness is a function of time. In…

In their response to the COVID-19 outbreak, governments face the dilemma to balance public health and economy. Mobility plays a central role in this dilemma because the movement of people enables both economic activity and virus spread. We…

We study the effectiveness of tracking and testing in mitigating or suppressing epidemic outbreaks, in combination with or as an alternative to quarantines and global lockdowns. We study these intervention methods on a network-based SEIR…

The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…

Causal discovery aims to uncover cause-and-effect relationships encoded in causal graphs by leveraging observational, interventional data, or their combination. The majority of existing causal discovery methods are developed assuming…

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for months. The U.S. has taken measures to counter it. On a daily basis, newly confirmed cases have been reported. In the early days, these numbers showed an increasing trend. Recently, the…

When an infection spreads in a community, an individual's probability of becoming infected depends on both her susceptibility and exposure to the contagion through contact with others. While one often has knowledge regarding an individual's…

Mitigation strategies that remove infectious individuals from the greater population have to balance their efficacy with the economic effects associated with quarantine and have to contend with the limited resources available to the public…

Causal effect estimation in networked systems is central to data-driven decision making. In such settings, interventions on one unit can spill over to others, and in complex physical or social systems, the interaction pathways driving these…

Exploring in environments with high-dimensional observations is hard. One promising approach for exploration is to use intrinsic rewards, which often boils down to estimating "novelty" of states, transitions, or trajectories with deep…

In limiting the rapid spread of highly infectious diseases like Covid-19 means to immediately identify individuals who had been in contact with a newly diagnosed infected person have proven to be important. Such potential victims can go…

Infectious diseases that incorporate pre-symptomatic transmission are challenging to monitor, model, predict and contain. We address this scenario by studying a variant of a stochastic susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model on…

In this paper, a stochastic dynamic control strategy is presented to prevent the spread of an infection over a homogeneous network. The infectious process is persistent, i.e., it continues to contaminate the network once it is established.…

Human behaviour strongly influences the spread of infectious diseases: understanding the interplay between epidemic dynamics and adaptive behaviours is essential to improve response strategies to epidemics, with the goal of containing the…

The study in group testing aims to develop strategies to identify a small set of defective items among a large population using a few pooled tests. The established techniques have been highly beneficial in a broad spectrum of applications…

Although there is always an interplay between the dynamics of information diffusion and disease spreading, the empirical research on the systemic coevolution mechanisms connecting these two spreading dynamics is still lacking. Here we…