[HN Gopher] Epidemics Plugin for the UG4 software
___________________________________________________________________
Epidemics Plugin for the UG4 software
Author : jonaz3d
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-11-26 11:50 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jonaz3d wrote:
| Hello World!
|
| It appears the EpidemicsRunner software toolkit has been made
| open source. It was developed by a crossfunctional team of the
| German Goethe Center for Scientific Computation Universitat and
| has apparently been used in real life settings as guidance tool.
|
| Images, description and source code can be found on
| https://github.com/devanshr/epidemics
|
| The EpidemicsRunner allows the user to run various algorithms
| used in epidemiologial modeling. The main feature is its in build
| editor and support an optimization framework, which allows the
| user to adjust model parameters to existing data.
|
| It has been designed for ease of use (but still full of features)
| because its original purpose was as a quick response tool for
| e.g. local authorities. The vision: A non expert user can quickly
| generate various scenarios based on local data and decide local
| measures until expert knowledge arrives.
|
| The tool has been used in various capacities. In order to inspire
| learning and maybe even help others, it has been made open
| source.
|
| You can use and modify it however you want. You can also import
| only the headers to your own C++ program.
|
| If you want to use the GUI, a build script is provided in the
| EpidemicsRunner folder. All features of the GUI are active if you
| put it in the plugin folder of the UG4 framework.
|
| jonpoljargo.de
| junon wrote:
| Curious, where in the German government is this used? RKI or
| BMG perhaps?
| balaji1 wrote:
| This is great. First visible commit is on Mar 12th. The front-
| end is HTML? Hope we start to see more gov apps being built as
| web apps hosted in the cloud. With WebAssembly, the C++ code
| should be usable directly.
| freemint wrote:
| Thank you for making public money sponsored code public.
|
| If you don't mind why was the software written in C++?
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I don't mean any disrespect by asking this, but asking why
| this was done in C++ implies you believe some other option
| would have been better; or at least it gives me that
| impression. What language should this have been done in, in
| your opinion?
| jonaz3d wrote:
| The code was written in C++ because of performance
| considerations of the ODE solvers.
| DreamWalker1 wrote:
| Does it mean you tried something like python or r and
| discovered that it was to slow?
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Maybe they did not have a useless idiot sitting around asking
| to rewrite shit in Rust.
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We ban
| accounts that keep doing this, and you've been doing it
| repeatedly.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| Conan_Kudo wrote:
| There's no license on the codebase, could someone add an OSI-
| approved license to this codebase? UG4 itself is LGPLv3
| (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html), so licensing
| this under the same terms would make sense.
| jonaz3d wrote:
| A license will be added soon and will be probably very
| permissive
| awlkjlkjlkaw wrote:
| Shitty software written by shitty people.
|
| I hope you all hang for your war crimes at the upcoming tribunal.
|
| Get fucked commies.
| freemint wrote:
| Commies are really, really rare in Germany. I find it
| personally doubtful that so many are involved in that research
| area.
|
| Also try to assume that they are acting in good faith.
| elloworld1221 wrote:
| Are they that rare? 5 percent of the vote goes to Die Linke,
| 1 in 20 isn't exactly non existent.
| oytis wrote:
| Die Linke is not a communist party. German communists are
| called DKP (15K votes in the last election) and MLPD (23K
| votes).
| elloworld1221 wrote:
| There are certainly many communists in Die Linke, even if
| they are a "big tent" left party.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jansan wrote:
| Commies are not rare in Germany, they just don't call
| themselved commies.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| What's wrong with commies?
| swader999 wrote:
| Taking something from someone else is wrong. Doing it for
| the good of others doesn't correct this theft. The degree
| that this happens in a society represents the level to
| which civilisation is broken and corrupted.
|
| Open source examples aren't communism, there's no threat
| of force. It relies on decentralized collaboration and
| natural willingness to create and share. There's a solid
| legal framework in place that promotes use, improvement
| and extension with low cost to all parties.
| antoinealb wrote:
| So would you say all things funded through taxation are
| wrong ? Not trying to be snarky, just wondering if that's
| the logical conclusion to that axiom.
| swader999 wrote:
| No. I would argue that less taxation would be needed if
| anti competition and regulatory structures were better
| enforced and supported.
| birdayz wrote:
| well that's one way to see it. however, in germany, we
| don't want to have homeless and extremely poor people, so
| we solve it by taking money away from the rich and middle
| class. for some people it might be called communism, for
| germans and in general europeans however that's just the
| baseline they expect from a functioning state.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mseepgood wrote:
| Can't be very good, or the government doesn't use it.
| ramsundhar20 wrote:
| Why have you used UG4, any specific reason? Would like to know,
| how this software works and how can we use in our country?
| 5tefan wrote:
| Living in Germany I have to say that no one predicted anything
| remotely correct regarding Corona. It is mostly anxiety and panic
| driven and short sighted and working against people not with the
| people.
|
| Corona brings live and death questions to the doors of normal
| people and also plays havoc with our political parties. It is
| embarrasing to observe to watch them for the most part. Seems for
| some of them the first problem they really have to work on
| instead of only talking about it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Also from Germany, I have to disagree. The models pretty much
| nailed the 4th wave down to a T. Missed it by one or two weeks.
| Based on the assumption nothing was dine against it. Nothing
| was done against it. The models are good, they are just not
| used to prepare or base decisions upon them.
| [deleted]
| disabled wrote:
| Yeah, the models in this program are definitely the ones you
| want to use for figuring out things in this situation.
|
| Ordinary Differential Equation model, Partial Differential
| Equation model, Finite Difference model, etc.
| davidkunz wrote:
| I agree with hef19898, here's a link to the prognosis of the
| Robert Koch Institute from July: https://www.rki.de/DE/Conten
| t/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...
| croes wrote:
| You are confusing what the politician said with the models.
| Even now parties like the FDP are blocking the possibility of
| lockdowns just for the sake of it and not based on any
| scientific model.
| junon wrote:
| Let's be clear here. There was the scientific response, and the
| political response. They do not work well together.
|
| Science worked fine. Politics did not. This is not specific to
| Germany.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Same here in NL. Scientific data routinely gets ignored
| during policy making, either because the data did not
| originate here and we're supposedly somehow special or
| because it didn't fit the preferred outcome. The results are
| predictable.
| LaputanMachine wrote:
| > no one predicted anything remotely correct regarding Corona.
|
| That is simply not true. The RKI (Germany's main institute for
| disease control and prevention) almost exactly predicted the
| current Covid numbers back in July [1]. The top left of the
| picture on page 7 shows the prediction under the assumption
| that 65% of Germans get vaccinated; currently 68% of Germans
| are vaccinated.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Archiv/2021/Au...
| phtrivier wrote:
| I fail to see how their prediction was "almost exactly
| correct."
|
| The prediction expected a bell curve peaking at the end of
| December, at around 400 7d incidence, assuming ~65%
| vaccinated.
|
| We are at then end of november, ~68% vaccinated, and the 7d
| incidence is already above 400, and still rising.
|
| We can only hope that they got the shape right, the timing
| slighly off and the peek not too off.
| sveme wrote:
| Probably depends on the input parameters. Lots of calls for
| freedom days and such as well as a general removal of
| measures probably changed the model conditions
| considerably.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Where are our goalposts?
|
| I personally think that for such a chaotic, human system, a
| prediction from six-months previous is pretty good if it's
| within a few weeks and probably less than an order of
| magnitude.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As southern European and living here for about half of my
| lifetime, the whole management reminds me of the usual mess of
| Portuguese governments.
|
| I actually never expected that somehow my home country would be
| able to manage better at decisions, instead of the yes/no/but-
| elections-are-coming that we had here.
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| How can one model (or simulate) what one do not fully understood?
|
| Remember that simulation of covid from UK with all the pomp and
| bravado? Not even close to reality.
|
| By the way, all simulations have the same relationship to reality
| as cartoons. This is just philosophy 101.
| xgb84j wrote:
| "The best and brightest built a state of the art forecasting
| model and it says I should do X" sells much better than "I
| assume this year will be exactly like last year and last year
| we should have done X".
|
| Basing your decisions on complicated scientific methods
| inspires confidence in many people, even when there is no
| benefit.
|
| It also mitigates responsibility for decision makers, because
| they can claim that they would have made the perfect decision
| if only the model's predictions would have been perfect as
| well.
| ivandenysov wrote:
| IMHO "King of the Hill" is a pretty accurate representation of
| reality
| aqme28 wrote:
| > How can one model (or simulate) what one do not fully
| understood?
|
| On the contrary. When you fully understand something, there's
| no longer a need for a model.
| stabbles wrote:
| find_package(Threads), people...
| luegen wrote:
| What's the issue with that?
| stabbles wrote:
| The CMakeLists.txt is very poor. Just use
| find_package(Threads REQUIRED) and do
| target_link_libraries(... Threads::Threads), and use
| target_compile_features or target properties to set the C++
| version. Right now the CMakeLists.txt requires the user to
| set that, at which point you might be better off with a
| Makefile...
| junon wrote:
| Yeah there's a lot of bad stuff happening in the CMake config.
| Further, this doesn't appear to be used by the government. At
| least not RKI.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-26 23:01 UTC)