BlogPost #028

(#28) Guillaume St-Onge - 7th December, 2023
Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts, United States)

Talk recording (Youtube)

RESEARCH TALK
"Navigating wastewater surveillance at airports with probability generating functions"

Abstract:

The quest for the “ideal” cities was carried on for two centuries by urbanists, wondering how cities “should” look like. Complex systems and the explosion of available data made this quest reappear and boosted it with renewed theories. The 15-minute city, in particular, heralded a new vision for cities where essential services must be easily accessible in less than 15 minutes by walking.. In this talk I’ll examine the feasibility and practicability of this concept in many cities worldwide. I will show how close cities are to the ideal of the 15-minute city by measuring the accessibility times to resources and services, revealing a strong heterogeneity of accessibility within and across cities, with a significant role played by local population densities. Then, I'll show how much a better redistribution of resources and services could heal the inequality of accessibility, highlighting pronounced discrepancies among cities in the minimum number of services needed to become a 15-minute city. This brings evidence to the fact that the proximity-based paradigm must be generalised to work on a wide range of local population densities.

DISCUSSION
"How to efficiently expand your interdisciplinary «expertise»"

Abstract:

This is a question that haunts many undergraduate and postgraduate students, or early career researchers. The issues of a lack of stability and the comparatively low salaries are felt by many of us and the alternatives seem a big compromise to our careers. 

I’ll describe my experience working in a research laboratory which is private and funded by a company, talking about the pros and cons. Questions like “how free is it to do research?” or “Do you have to get a profit?” arise naturally and there are some red flags to check when applying to a private research laboratory. 

Anyway, maybe the original question of academia vs company is a bit ill-posed and you should ask yourself something deeper, but it is a hard task to examine the possibilities without fully knowing what exactly comes with them. However, we often tend to forget the possibility to go back and change trajectory.

Exploration or exploitation, that is the question! Hey, NetPALS, we've all faced the dilemma: whether to stick to our research or expand our expertise. Guillaume discussed this at our last seminar with his talk “How to efficiently expand your interdisciplinary «expertise»”. 

In the first part, Guillaume discussed using probability generating functions to model the spread of diseases through wastewater surveillance at airports—a valuable tool for tracking the international dissemination of pathogens. 

As Guillaume tackled the topic of infectious disease propagation, he faced long waiting times for simulations to run. For those of us who get bored easily, we know how this can be frustrating. So he tried to enhance their performance; that turned out to be a small side project.

In the discussion, our speaker found that engaging in small projects is the best way to extend knowledge. It is always hard to predict how small a project will be, but at least it is a step towards a sea of knowledge that we, as curious scientists would like to cruise.

The discussion is still open, if you want to share your opinion leave a comment on this thread! The talk is available on our Youtube channel.