Abstract

This talk will introduce the Operation Outbreak (OO) platform (https://operationoutbreak.org/). OO follows the steps of pioneering projects such as Thinking Tags and FluPhone, by enabling participatory epidemic games where a digital pathogen spreads through participants’ mobile devices. These games provide an immersive activity for students to learn about outbreak science and generate real-world datasets that can be used by researchers to study how human behaviour influences disease dynamics. The talk will go over the history of OO, data from recent games, and next steps with the project.

Andrés Colubri is an assistant professor in the Department of Genomics and Computational Biology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Argentina and an MFA from the Design Media Arts Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Andrés’ hybrid career has traversed science, technology, and art. His lab now brings together computational scientists, software engineers, and visual designers to develop new methods and tools for infectious disease research (https://co-labo.org/)