OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Mathematical descriptions of infectious disease outbreaks are fundamental to understanding how transmission occurs. Reductively, two approaches are used: individual based simulators and governing equation models, and both approaches have a multitude of pros and cons. In this talk I will connect these two worlds via general branching processes. I will discuss (at a high level) the rather beautiful mathematics that arises from these branching processes and how these can help us understand the assumptions underpinning mathematical models for infectious disease. I will then explain how this new maths can help us understand uncertainty better, and show some simple examples. This talk will be a little technical, but I will focus as much as possible on intuition and the big picture.
