Cliff Kerr
Dr. Cliff Kerr is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling, part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he works on COVID-19, STIs, and family planning. Previously, he completed a B.S. in neuroscience and a Ph.D. in physics, was a lecturer in scientific computing at the University of Sydney, co-founded two startups (on data analytics and health economics), worked on a DARPA project teaching robots to pick up balls, and developed an algorithm that composes music in real time based on brain activity recordings. He lives in New York.
Sessions
Agent-based models (ABMs) are powerful tools for understanding how people behave and interact. However, many ABMs are slow, cumbersome to use, or both. Here we introduce Starsim, an open-source, high-performance ABM specialized for modeling different diseases (such as HIV, STIs, and tuberculosis). Built on NumPy, Numba, and SciPy, Starsim's performance rivals ABMs implemented in Java or C++, but with the convenience provided by Python: specifically, the ability to quickly implement and refine new disease modules. Starsim can also be extended to other applications in which people interact on timescales from days to decades, including economics and social science.