Science Reversions in Torino: DSAA'18 – Luca Maria Aiello – Medium

Alessandro Vespignani is a modern numen of computational epidemiology. He opened his talk with a brief survey on the history of numerical epidemic models, emphasizing how their advances virtually halted in the '50s. Those data-hungry models started to work egregiously only after the Big Data revolution: Multidimensional and granular data from a galaxy of public and private providers allowed epidemiologists to predict with striking accuracy the spreading of pandemics like H1N1, Ebola, and Zika. Inebriate by the power of Big Data, the scientific community explored new predictive models that were increasingly data-driven and less focused on understanding the underlying phenomena. That line of thinking led to glaring failures, epitomized by the infamous Google Flu Trends fiasco.