Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In order to estimate the spread of potential pandemic diseases and the efficiency of various containment policies, it is helpful to have an accurate model of the structure of human contact networks. The literature contains several explicit and implicit models, but none behave like actual network data with respect to the spread of disease. We discuss the difficulty of modeling real human networks, motivate the study of some open practical questions about network structure, and suggest some possible avenues of attack based on some related research.