Events Calendar
4th Disease Modeling Workshop was held from 24th – 28th April 2017 at the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, UNIMAS.
by Assosciate Professor Dr. Jane Labadin,
Faculty of Computer Science & IT, UNIMAS
The 4th Disease Modeling Workshop was held from 24th – 28th April 2017 at the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, UNIMAS. The Department of Computational
Science and Mathematics, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, UNIMAS initiated the Disease Modeling Workshop back in 2014 with the aim to bring together
researchers in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science and Public Health in one platform to share knowledge and current research activities mainly in facilitating the eradication
and control of infectious diseases. Since then, the founding chairman of the workshop, Associate Professor Dr Jane Labadin ensured that the workshop become an annual event not
only for sharing knowledge but also to gauge research collaboration.
The arrangement of this 4th Workshop differed from the previous workshops in that it is an intensive hands-on workshop whereby the participants were grouped in four and they
worked on a problem to be solved using the tools that they learned during the workshop. Two parallel hands-on trainings that are applicable to modeling disease were lined up.
The R Programming exposed the participants to a programming environment that illustrates several ways to describe disease progress over time. Our French research collaborator
from the Institute of Research for Sustainable Development (IRD), Dr Marc Choisy have facilitated the R session. This is the third time Dr Choisy have assisted us with DMo
workshops. The other session is the GAMA Platform, which was facilitated by Prof Alexis Drogoul, the current Director of IRD (Vietnam & Philippines) and his co-researcher,
Damien Phillipon. The GAMA software is a modeling and simulation development environment for building spatially explicit agent-based simulations.
There were twenty participants from research students to budding researchers and public health specialists, attended the workshop and they went through series of relevant
lectures in the first three days and then in the next 48 hours they worked on epidemiological problems of which on the final day they presented their findings. Associate
Professor Dr David Perera and Professor Dr Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer have also came to share their views on the current research work in disease modeling. Like in every DMo
organized, we concluded the workshop with a Roundtable meeting where all participants congregated together with the facilitators and invited guests to a discussion. Based on the
previous workshops, we know that local talents are available and this current workshop have shown that this relationship between technologists and public health experts can move
forward. The Dean of the Faculty, Dr Johari Abdullah moderated the discussion particularly in the proposal to form a research cluster in Disease Modeling with the aim to assist
the country in the managing and monitoring of infectious diseases.
