Correction to 'A biomimetic accelerometer inspired by the cricket's clavate hair'.
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Future climates: Markov blankets and active inference in the biosphere.
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
We formalize the Gaia hypothesis about the Earth climate system using advances in theoretical biology based on the minimization of variational free energy. This amounts to the claim that non-equilibrium steady-state dynamics-that underwrite our climate-depend on the Earth system possessing a Markov blanket. Our formalization rests on how the metabo...
Inference of COVID-19 epidemiological distributions from Brazilian hospital data.
...Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Knowing COVID-19 epidemiological distributions, such as the time from patient admission to death, is directly relevant to effective primary and secondary care planning, and moreover, the mathematical modelling of the pandemic generally. We determine epidemiological distributions for patients hospitalized with COVID-19 using a large dataset (N = 21 ...
The effect of social balance on social fragmentation
Published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface
With the availability of internet, social media, etc., the interconnectedness of people within most societies has increased tremendously over the past decades. Across the same timespan, an increasing level of fragmentation of society into small isolated groups has been observed. With a simple model of a society, in which the dynamics of individual ...
Spider webs inspiring soft robotics.
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
In soft robotics, bio-inspiration ranges from hard- to software. Orb web spiders provide excellent examples for both. Adapted sensors on their legs may use morphological computing to fine-tune feedback loops that supervise the handling and accurate placement of silk threads. The spider's webs embody the decision rules of a complex behaviour that re...
Will an outbreak exceed available resources for control? Estimating the risk from invading pathogens using practical def...
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Forecasting whether or not initial reports of disease will be followed by a severe epidemic is an important component of disease management. Standard epidemic risk estimates involve assuming that infections occur according to a branching process and correspond to the probability that the outbreak persists beyond the initial stochastic phase. Howeve...
Beyond R0: heterogeneity in secondary infections and probabilistic epidemic forecasting.
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
The basic reproductive number, R0, is one of the most common and most commonly misapplied numbers in public health. Often used to compare outbreaks and forecast pandemic risk, this single number belies the complexity that different epidemics can exhibit, even when they have the same R0. Here, we reformulate and extend a classic result from random n...
On the importance of trip destination for modelling individual human mobility patterns
Published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface
Obtaining insights into human mobility patterns and being able to reproduce them accurately is of the utmost importance in a wide range of applications from public health, to transport and urban planning. Still the relationship between the effort individuals will invest in a trip and the importance of its purpose is not taken into account in indivi...
A general mathematical method for predicting spatio-temporal correlations emerging from agent-based models.
Published in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
Agent-based models are used to study complex phenomena in many fields of science. While simulating agent-based models is often straightforward, predicting their behaviour mathematically has remained a key challenge. Recently developed mathematical methods allow the prediction of the emerging spatial patterns for a general class of agent-based model...
Multi-model and network inference based on ensemble estimates: avoiding the madness of crowds
Published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface
Recent progress in theoretical systems biology, applied mathematics and computational statistics allows us to compare the performance of different candidate models at describing a particular biological system quantitatively. Model selection has been applied with great success to problems where a small number—typically less than 10—of models are com...
