Posted 209 days ago by
maire
Read about some of our scientific progress in the first half of 2012. Read more.
Posted 458 days ago by
maire
Thanks for letting us know. This seems to be a problem with some (quite a few) workunits in that particular simulation experiment.
I have cancelled several thousand workunits of that series, but it is hard to catch them all without affecting other simulations. You may see a few more before it's over.
Sorry for the inconvenience,
Nick
Posted 475 days ago by
maire
Status update – December 2011
It’s been a very long time since we last posted an update on the progress we make with your contribution, I apologize for this.
The results and findings of the project have been reported to the scientific community at a number of international conferences by members of our research group, including the European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health, the Open Knowledge Conference, and the annual meeting of the Swiss Society of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology. At this time, a delegation is presenting the most recent results at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
One more scientific article – on the potential of case management to prevent re-establishment of malaria in areas where it has been eliminated – has just been accepted for publication. Please find a link to this on the publication list at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications_by_BOINC_projects#malariacontrol.net if you want to learn more.
Finally, we are planning for an upgrade of the server hardware to host this project. Our current server has been running very reliably for more than four years, but recently we are approaching a capacity limit. Maintenance and monitoring becomes tedious, and we plan to migrate the project to new hardware in Q1 2012.
Thank you for your continued support!
Nick
Posted 663 days ago by
maire
Some good news to start this update: the proposal we submitted to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation for the extension of our malaria modelling project was accepted, which means that we can continue our work on the study of the impact of malaria control interventions. The next project phase will allow us to continue the study of a number of possible approaches to fight malaria, but will in particular focus on the evaluation of novel vector control interventions (these are interventions that target the mosquitoes that transmit the disease from human to human).
Some of the necessary adaptations in the simulation software have already been implemented, and are part of openMalaria version 6.57, which is our current test release.
There were two more scientific articles published that report on simulation studies we could do with your support. If you are interested in the results that come out of malariacontrol.net, please visit the page http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications_by_BOINC_projects#malariacontrol.net on the BOINC website, where we keep a list of publications that made use of malariacontrol.net. We keep updating this, and will soon be able to add a few more papers that have been reviewed and accepted for publication. This page also lists the outputs of other BOINC projects, and therefore provides a useful guide to which projects you may consider supporting.
Thank you for your continued support,
Nick
Posted 677 days ago by
maire
Hi im familiar with the work of Vespignani and Satorras on complex networks (more specifically regarding the epidemic threshold). Is there any data which Malariacontrol.net can contribue to this subject?
Unlikely, as we usually focus on the study of endemic settings, and our model populations are not described by network structures.
Have a look at these publications which describe the base model, or the if you would like to learn more.
Thanks,
Nick
Posted 762 days ago by
maire
During the first two weeks of February we saw a lot of activity as malariacontrol.net was chosen to be the project for the 3. Team Charity contest. A big thank you to the administrators of L`Alliance Francophone and Team SETI.Germany, who organized the contest! And of course also to all those who participated!
This performance boost came at the right time, while we are trying to estimate model parameters for a whole family of models. Valerie explained the rationale for looking at different models in her post a few months ago.
The process of parameter estimation has been described earlier in the posts here and here.
You can see the current status of this optimization process in the image below, where each individual plot corresponds to one of the models Valerie mentions:
You can come back here if you are interested in the progress of this over the next few months: the plots are re-generated once per day.
In the meantime, we published another scientific article, which discusses predictions of the simulation models:
Smith TA, Chitnis N, Briët OJ, Tanner M.
Uses of mosquito-stage transmission-blocking vaccines against Plasmodium falciparum.
Trends Parasitol. 2011 Jan 27. [Epub ahead of print]
Here is the summary, you can contact us if you would like to receive a PDF version of the complete article.
A quantitative framework is used to explore the potential applications and probable effects of sexual stage or mosquito stage transmission blocking vaccines (TBVs) against malaria. The combination of TBVs with biocides or other malaria vaccines will increase chances of interrupting transmission, whereas the value of TBVs for morbidity control will be limited. Vaccine combination will also protect against selection of insensitive parasites. Simulations indicate that TBVs will reduce risks of reestablishment of transmission when vector control is withdrawn.
Simple mathematical analysis shows that efficacy and coverage are equally important, implying that a vaccine that requires a small number of doses (ideally one) is preferable to one that is difficult to deliver, even if this entails accepting a lower efficacy.
Thank you for your ongoing support!
On behalf of the project team,
Nick
Posted 810 days ago by
maire
The server was overloaded (again). We've found a few more configuration parameters that we could tweak to reduce disk I/O. This seems to have worked, server load is down and there are workunits available again. That should hopefully keep us going we wait for the new server hardware to arrive.
Thanks,
Nick
Posted 850 days ago by
maire
We’re slowly working our way towards a solution to the whole credit/scheduling issue we’ve experienced over the past week. Today we took the project offline in order to restore host, user and team credits from our backups (the situation last Friday). We then went through all the valid results that we received in this period, and worked out the correct amount of credit to be granted. Based on that we then updated the credit records to today’s total.
A few comments:
-We did not recalculate recent average credit scores; this will happen automatically, but take some time to adjust.
-Validation is currently disabled. We plan to re-enable this on Monday, in the mean time your results will be left unvalidated with credit pending.
Sorry again for the rather chaotic week. Those of you that have been with us for some time know that this is quite exceptional.
Thanks for bearing with us.
Nick
Posted 850 days ago by
maire
The project is running again, total credits are fixed, but validation is currently disabled.
Posted 860 days ago by
maire
We have recently analysed a lot of the results of simulation experiments we ran over the last few months. Some of the results are currently being written up for publication, others were already presented to the malaria research community at scientific meetings. Here are the links to summaries of presentations given recently at the Parasites to Prevention: Advances in the understanding of malaria conference, and the Annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Modeling the effects of vector control interventions in reducing malaria transmission, morbidity and mortality
Predicted impact of mosquito-stage transmission-blocking vaccines using an ensemble of microsimulations
Using ensemble modeling to predict the cost-effectiveness of pre-erythrocytic malaria vaccines
Modeling the effects of vector control interventions in reducing malaria transmission and disease
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Nick