Containing Ebola With Mathematical Modeling

When the Ebola virus looked as if it might run rampant across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, many groups at IBM sprang into action. One was a team of Almaden-based researchers working primarily on a pet food safety project with Mars Incorporated. The team organized a weekly Wednesday morning conference call in which some 40 organizations addressed ways to contain the spread of the disease until a cure could be found.

In this episode of Inside IBM Research, Kun Hu, a researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center, talks about STEM, the Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeler, a mathematical tool that lets researchers simulate the evolution of highly contagious diseases such as Ebola with the goal of understanding them — and, ideally, preventing their spread altogether.


Inside IBM Research is recorded and edited by Brook Finkelstein, IBM Research communications.