A core component of the project was the development of a simulation study investigating intervention measures against the spread of the virus at the project's host university TU Graz. Close collaboration with administrative staff involved in organizing the organisational response to the pandemic allowed for a tailored approach to the modelling and research questions asked. Empirical student enrollment data allowed for the construction of a detailed contact network of students. The work lead to the publication entitled "Assessment of the Effectiveness of Omicron Transmission Mitigation Strategies for European Universities Using an Agent-Based Network Model" (
https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciac340(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases. The main finding of the study is that even with high vaccination rates among students and teachers and stringent non-pharmaceutical intervention measures, given the extreme infectiousness of later variants of the Corona virus, large outbreaks cannot be prevented in a university environment.
In collaboration with researchers from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna a simulation study was conducted, stress-testing the resilience of the Austrian healthcare system, leveraging a data set of comprehensive records of over 100 mio doctor-patient contacts over a full year in Austria. The work lead to the publication "Stress-testing the resilience of the Austrian healthcare system using agent-based simulation" (
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31766-7(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) in the journal Nature Communications. A core result is the considerable diversity in the resilience of the healthcare system in different regions and for different specialisations. Given that the simulation is parameterised with a comprehensive data set of the Austrian healthcare system, the insights derived from the simulations allow for a direct application of our findings to healthcare planning in Austria.
The later work in the project was mainly concerned with the development of methods for the measurement of information trustworthiness (see our article "High level of correspondence across different news domain quality rating sets", PNAS nexus,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad286(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) a descriptive exploration of the information sharing practices of political elites (see our article "Social media sharing of low-quality news sources by political elites", PNAS nexus,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac186(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) and an explanation of the prevalence of low-quality information by the fracturing of the concept of "honesty" into two distinct components relating to evidence- and intuition based arguments, respectively (see "From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians", Nature Human Behaviour,
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01691-w(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)). A main result of this line of research is that the spread of low-quality information by political elites can be used by the use of more intuition-based language, whereas more high-quality information is linked to the use of more fact-based language patterns.
Lastly, two side-projects of the action related to Open Science and research ethics, respectively, also lead to publications: "MapOSR - A mapping review dataset of empirical studies on Open Science", F1000 data notes,
http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.121665.1(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie) and "The right to audit and power asymmetries in algorithm auditing", EPJ Data Science,
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00454-5(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie).
