EDISON: a web application for computational health informatics at scale

SPublic health issues, from virus and disease transmission, to the spread of unhealthy behaviors (such as smoking and obesity) are global priorities. They can lead not only to fatalities, but also to decreased quality of life, large expenditures for health care, and the onset of other ailments. Here we present EDISON: a web-based modeling environment that can be used to perform complex computational experiments involving very general (epidemiological) contagion processes over social networks. EDISON is publicly accessible by scientists and domain experts interested in carrying out in-silico social and epidemiological experiments. EDISON is unique in that: ( i ) the experiments can be carried out at scale (populations may range from a few hundred to millions of agents), ( ii ) it is web-based with an easy to use UI---it is specifically designed for use by epidemiologists, social scientists, and (government) practitioners who are not computing experts, and ( iii ) it has a digital library that contains a large number of open source social networks and many behavior models. EDISON has been used for a number of theoretical studies. We illustrate its utility through case studies of disease and behavioral contagion transmission.