Due to the illness of Prof. Dirk Brockmann, this event has been CANCELED.  We apologize for any inconvenience and hope to reschedule this event in the near future.

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Please join PRMIA Chicago for a meeting on Thursday, October 29 when Prof. Dirk Brockmann from Northwestern University will talk about his research on tracking the spread of the 2009-H1N1 virus and predicting the pandemic’s future.  A panel discussion on pandemics and their potential impact will follow Prof. Brockmann’s presentation.

Please note that to register for a PRMIA event you must be logged into your account so that the system can recognize you.  If you are not a member of PRMIA, you must first become a member: Click on "Membership" on the PRMIA home page and then choose "Free Membership" if you like.  You can register for an event after you become a member and you are logged into your account.



5:00 - 5:30 P.M.      Registration

5:30 - 5:40 P.M.      Introduction by Timur Gök, PRMIA Regional Director

5:40 - 6:25 P.M.      Presentation by Prof. Dirk Brockmann, Northwestern University

6:25 - 7:00 P.M.      Panel Discussion

Sara Alexander, ChicagoFIRST

Dirk Brockmann, Northwestern University

Guenever Scheuermann, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

7:00 - 7:30 P.M.      Networking Reception

PRMIA thanks the CME Group for generously providing the use of their auditorium for this event (www.cmegroup.com).

Presentation

Prof. Dirk Brockmann

Northwestern University

Human Mobility in our globalized world has reached a complexity and volume of unprecedented degree.  More than 60 million people travel billions of miles on more than 2 million international flights each week.  Hundreds of millions of people commute on a complex web of highways and railroads most of which operate at their maximum capacity.  Human mobility is responsible for the geographical spread of emergent human infectious diseases and plays a key role in human mediated bioinvasion, the dominant factor in the global biodiversity crisis.

Prof. Dirk Brockmann from Northwestern University will report on the recent discovery of scaling laws in global human traffic based on the analysis of the geographic circulation of over 10 million individual dollar bills in the United States[1].  Prof. Brockmann will present a complex network perspective on multi-scale human traffic networks, report on their statistical properties and the recent application by him and his colleagues of these multi-scale mobility networks in the prediction of the time course of the emergent H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic in the United States.

A panel discussion on pandemics and their potential economic impact will follow Prof. Brockmann’s presentation.

[1] Brockmann et al. "The scaling laws of human travel." Nature (2006) vol. 439 (7075) pp. 462-465.

Speaker Biography

Dirk Brockmann is an associate professor in the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University. His research focus is on fractional and anomalous diffusion, spatial dynamics of infectious diseases and human-mediated bioinvasion, geolinguistics, and transportation networks. Prof. Brockmann has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Göttingen, Germany and studied physics at Duke University as well as in Göttingen.  Before he joined Northwestern University in 2007, he worked for two years at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization.  He is a member of the American and German Physical Societies.

In May 2009, a New York Times article featured Prof. Brockmann’s research.  On his website, he discusses the background of his research using data from the website Where’s George? and provides links to some of his publications.

Panelists

Sara Alexander

Sara Alexander was named the Deputy Director of ChicagoFIRST in February 2006.  Sara works with the Executive Director and the full ChicagoFIRST membership in all project areas, including emergency preparedness and response planning, building public sector relationships at the local, state, and federal levels, coordinating with other critical infrastructure sectors, and the managing the organization overall.

Prior to coming to ChicagoFIRST, Sara served as the Assistant Director of Emergency Management for the City of Chicago.  With the Office of Emergency Management, she supervised critical projects in all areas of emergency management -- mitigation, preparedness, response, and recover – for the City of Chicago.

Guenever (Jenny) E. Scheuermann

Guenever (Jenny) E. Scheuermann is an Assistant Vice President responsible for Enterprise Risk and Business Continuity at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.  Jenny co-architected and currently directs the Bank’s approach to corporate risk management.  She also leads initiatives designed to enhance the transparency and cross-organizational approach to managing risks for the Federal Reserve System.  In August of 2008, she was asked to lead the Bank’s business continuity risk management effort.  In this role she assists Bank management in preparing for, and being resilient to, a wide array of potential disruptions.  This role capitalizes on the strategic leadership exhibited through her overarching responsibilities for risk management at the Bank.  Jenny coordinates the Bank’s Risk Policy Committee and serves as an advisor to the committee chair.

Jenny began her career as a bank examiner with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  After seven years as an examiner, Jenny left to join Bank One as a Vice President and CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) Analysis Manager, in the Community Development area. 

Her educational credentials include a BA in Finance from DePaul University, Chicago.  Jenny earned both her Safety & Soundness and Consumer Compliance examiner commissions with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  She also holds an Associate Business Continuity Professional certification.

Background Materials

Pandemics and Networks:

Lessons for Policy-Makers and Regulators

Timur Gök

Regional Director, PRMIA Chicago

The Great Influenza Epidemic (the "Spanish flu") began in January 1918.  By the time it ended in June 1920, the pandemic had killed 1.9 to 5.5 percent of the world's population (35-100 million people) and was associated with a 12 percent fall in real per capita GDP in the U.S. (and a 6.6 percent average fall in a sample of 36 countries) from the previous peak in 1918.  Lost lives and output were accompanied by declines in stock prices.  R.J. Barro and J.F. Ursua (2009) observed that 11 countries (out of the 18 for which they had data) had stock market crashes (cumulated rates of return of negative 25 percent or less).  The U.S. stock market's real return was better than average, but by 1920 it was negative 22 percent.

Today, 2009-H1N1 is unlikely to be as devastating.  As the U.S. and the northern hemisphere brace for the resurgence of 2009-H1N1, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has presented a "plausible scenario" for planning purposes (press release and PCAST report) that 30 to 50 percent of the U.S. population could be infected by this fall and winter and that could result in 30,000 to 90,000 deaths (as compared with 30,000 to 40,000 annual deaths due to seasonal flu in the U.S.).

What will be the likely global economic impact of the resurgence of 2009-H1N1?  A 2006 study of the likely consequences of an influenza pandemic had concluded that even a mild pandemic (similar to the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu) would have been costly in terms lives lost (1.4 million lives) and total world output reduced (nearly one percent or $330 billion in constant 2006 prices), with the cost in lost lives and output increasing dramatically in more severe scenarios such as the Spanish flu.  A 2006 study by the Congressional Budget Office had reached a similar conclusion: a 1.5% decline in GDP in a mild scenario and 5% decline in a severe scenario (the study and an update).

Modeling Pandemics

The impact of 2009-H1N1, just as any pandemic, will depend on the scope and length of the pandemic as well as policy responses to it.  Fortunately, today we have the hindsight gained from past experiences and policy mistakes as well as better tools and models to track, predict and manage pandemics.

The spread of a disease depends on its infectiousness; the susceptible, infectious or removed (recovered or died) agents comprising the population; and the network of associations among agents.  In classical models developed beginning in the 1920s, the population was viewed as one great vat or, subsequently, as a lattice or a random network.  In 1999, the theory of networks advanced greatly when A.-L. Barabasi and R. Albert introduced the concept of a scale-free network -- a network dominated by hubs (a relatively small number of nodes with many links). They observed that many large networks such as genetic networks, the World Wide Web, power grids and some social networks, are scale-free, which has important implications for their functioning and survival.  For instance, although a scale-free network is less susceptible to accidental failures, it is more vulnerable to coordinated attacks targeted at hubs.  Further, even weakly contagious viruses will spread and persist in scale-free networks.

A scale-free social network may facilitate the spread of a pandemic through hubs, but may also make immunizations more effective by targeting the hubs (provided that they can be identified).  In the case of a network of financial institutions, a scale-free network would be less vulnerable to accidental failure because small institutions would vastly outnumber network hubs.  However, such a network would be subject to greater systemic risk due to the failure of hubs -- a situation that brings to mind the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the systemic risks posed by seemingly too-big-to-fail financial institutions such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America and others.  The flip-side of the threat posed by the failure of hubs (such as financial institutions that are too-big-to-fail) is that such a network may be easier to regulate provided that regulators are able to map the network and are willing and able to regulate the hubs (in other words, neither regulatory capture nor regulatory competence is a problem), in which case a regulator simply could prevent too-big-to-fail hubs from emerging in the first place.

How is the spread of a pandemic over a network modeled?  One approach is to use proxy networks.  For instance, Dirk Brockmann at Northwestern University and his colleagues use air traffic and commuter traffic patterns for the U.S. and the information aggregated by the website Where’s George?, which tracks the travels of $1 bills across the country, to model spatiotemporal phenomena.  Alessandro Vespignani at Indiana University and his colleagues, on the other hand, integrate sociodemographics and population mobility data in the Global Epidemic and Mobility model.  Another approach is to develop agent-based models (ABM) that capture the complexity of social networks with individual agents who adapt their behaviors based on the prevalence of a disease.  One such model is the Global-Scale Agent Model developed by Jon Parker at the Brookings Institution’s Center on Social and Economic Dynamics.

Current research on networks presents other intriguing possibilities for modeling systemic or network failures.  In September 2009, Stefano Allesina and Mercedes Pascual, from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan, respectively, reported on an algorithm that identifies the species in an ecosystem that would cause the most damage when removed.  Their algorithm, which ranks a species as important if other species rely on it for their survival, is adapted from Google’s PageRank(TM) algorithm.

As the North American flu season approaches and discussions on too big to fail institutions and regulatory frameworks in the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis continue, network theory is likely to feature even more prominently on the agendas of healthcare agencies and financial regulators.  In the regulatory domain, papers by A. Haldane and E. Nier et al. from the Bank of England provide useful introductions.  However, much work remains to be done to bridge the chasm between financial applications and applications in physics, biology and computer science.

Lessons from History

According to J.M. Barry's account, the response of the U.S. government to the Great Influenza Epidemic was one of obfuscation and was shaped by how it had disseminated news of the war.  An adviser to the U.S. government at the time had articulated that strategy as "Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms … There is nothing in experience to tell us one is always preferable to the other … The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value.  It matters very little if it is true or false."  In 1917, the day after President Woodrow Wilson received a memo from another adviser that "most citizens were 'mentally children' and that 'self-determination' had to be subordinated to 'order' and 'prosperity'," he set a communication strategy whose simple premise was to keep up morale.  Consequently, after the pandemic arrived in the U.S. he "never made a single statement about it" and other officials followed his lead.  "Chicago's director of public health, for instance, decided not to 'interfere with the morale of the community,' explaining: 'It is our job to keep people from fear.  Worry kills more than disease'."

Under the spell of such thinking, as the Spanish flu pandemic extended its deadly reach, the lack of truthful communication spawned terror and absenteeism that drained the health-care system, shipyards, railroads, and telephone exchanges, and other economic activities, exacerbating the economic toll of the pandemic.  However, San Francisco, where leaders followed a more open communication policy, was able to function better.

As Barry states, compliance with public-health guidelines is essential for managing a pandemic successfully and "Compliance requires trust, and that depends on truth-telling. … The truth should not be managed, it should be told."  That is sound advice that resonates beyond managing pandemics.

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