Centre for Networked Intelligence

Dear All, Networks Seminar, supported by the Centre for Networked Intelligence, is a technical discussion forum in topics including but not limited to computer networks, machine learning, signal processing, and information theory. The seminar series has a webpage hosted at https://cni.iisc.ac.in/seminars/. You are invited to the following seminar held as part of this series. Title: How Do Models for Disease Spread Help Us Make Better Policies? Speaker: Prof. Gautam Menon, Professor, Ashoka University Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM (IST) Date: 27 April 2026 Venue: GJ Hall and Online on Zoom Tea/Coffee: 5:00 PM Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83388976389?pwd=XcpO3GhLxsR14a7SVbPx33HQQa1jbt.1 Zoom Meeting ID: 833 8897 6389, Pass Code: NSSIISc YouTube Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hb2pUw9vqw Webpage Link: https://cni.iisc.ac.in/seminars/2026-04-27/ <https://cni.iisc.ac.in/seminars/2026-04-27/> Abstract: As a scientist who models how infectious diseases spread, understanding the usefulness of models in helping frame better health policy is important to me. Some years ago, we began to develop BharatSim, India's first ultra-large-scale agent-based simulation, initially in the context of understanding COVID-19 spread. More recently, we've demonstrated the use of BharatSim in understanding specific questions of direct policy relevance: when to open schools in the background of a pandemic, what interventions might work in the case of a bird-flu spillover event into humans, the nature of a potential mpox epidemic as well as the control of typhoid spread in urban contexts. I'll talk broadly about the importance of good models and what should go into their construction, as well as provide illustrations from my own work, in particular BharatSim. Bio: Gautam Menon, currently a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University, Sonipat, was previously a Professor at the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai where he was also the Founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He was Dean of Research at Ashoka University (2022-2025), an Adjunct Professor at TIFR, Mumbai (2019-2021) and a Visiting Professor at the Mechanobiology Institute of the National University of Singapore (2011-2013). He has been awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the DST, was named an Outstanding Research Investigator of the DAE-SRC, was selected as an Outstanding Referee of the American Physical Society and has been a Shastri Fellow of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India). He is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on 'Strengthening the Use of Epidemiological Modelling for Emerging and Pandemic Infectious Diseases', a co-author of the recently published Lancet Commission on 'A Citizen-centred Health System for India', and a member of the WHO 'Technical Advisory Group on Embedding Ethics in Health and Climate Change Policy'. More Details: https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/gautam-menon-2/ ALL ARE WELCOME. Thank you, CNI Seminar Series Organizing Committee.

Dear All, Networks Seminar, supported by the Centre for Networked Intelligence, is a technical discussion forum in topics including but not limited to computer networks, machine learning, signal processing, and information theory. The seminar series has a webpage hosted at https://cni.iisc.ac.in/seminars/. You are invited to the following seminar held as part of this series. Title: Consensus in the Weighted Voter Model with Noise-free and Noisy Observations Speaker: Prof. Ayalvadi Ganesh, Professor, University of Bristol Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM (IST) Date: 04 May 2026 Venue: GJ Hall and Online on Zoom Tea/Coffee: 5:00 PM Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83388976389?pwd=XcpO3GhLxsR14a7SVbPx33HQQa1jbt.1 Zoom Meeting ID: 833 8897 6389, Pass Code: NSSIISc YouTube Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PNY-r4xyj0 Webpage Link: https://cni.iisc.ac.in/seminars/2026-05-04/ <https://cni.iisc.ac.in/seminars/2026-05-04/> Abstract: Collective decision-making is an important problem in swarm robotics arising in many different contexts and applications. The Weighted Voter Model has been proposed to collectively solve the best-of-n problem and analysed in the thermodynamic limit. We present an exact finite-population analysis of the best-of-two model on complete as well as regular network topologies. We also present a novel analysis of this model when agent evaluations of options suffer from measurement error. Bio: Ayalvadi Ganesh is a Professor of Applied Probability at the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol. His research interests include large deviations, queueing theory, random graph dynamics, and decentralised algorithms. He won the INFORMS Best Publication Award in 2005 and the ACM Sigmetrics Best Paper Prize in 2010. More Details: https://people.maths.bris.ac.uk/~maajg/ ALL ARE WELCOME. Thank you, CNI Seminar Series Organizing Committee.