Gautam Menon delivered a lecture on ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches for Wicked Problems: The BharatSim Program’. It was chaired by Ananya Vajpeyi.
Describing the spread of infectious diseases is among the most interdisciplinary of endeavours. For this reason, it is an example of a class of problems, climate change among them, that have been called "wicked". We have, over the past two years, worked on developing India's first ultra-large-scale computer simulations of model "agents", a way of representing how individuals interact and transmit disease amongst them. These models have interesting implications for the social sciences. The speaker will describe the current state of the BharatSim program, concentrating on where a dialogue between the sciences and the social sciences can be most fruitful.
Gautam Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University, Sonepat as well as the Director of its Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS). He is a Professor at IMSc, Chennai and an Adjunct Professor at the TIFR, Mumbai. He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India). Apolitical named him recently in its world-wide list of 100 most influential academics in government, for his work on COVID-19 in India.
Ananya Vajpeyi is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
Friday, 1 April 2022, 4.30 pm, Zoom https://bit.ly/3N4Lcgd
