NetSci 2025, here we come

My colleague Lorenz Hilfiker and I have been accepted for a poster presentation at NetSci2025! We look forward to traveling to Maastricht (NL) this June to share our work with experts in the field.

Our research explores the potential of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for epidemic source detection—identifying the origin of an outbreak given a contact network and the epidemic states of all nodes.

Our (still preliminary) findings suggest that GNNs may not yet live up to their promise, as they are consistently outperformed by more traditional source detection methods. However, we have only explored a small region of the GNN design space so far, so it is too early to rule them out as a valuable tool for this problem.

If you’re interested, check out our abstract below—and stay tuned for a full paper on this topic!