Vaccination has been one of the most successful public health measures since the introduction of basic sanitation. Substantial mortality and morbidity reductions have been achieved via vaccination against many infections, and the list of diseases that are potentially controllable by vaccines is growing steadily. We introduce key challenges for modeling in shaping our understanding and guiding p...

'Digital ecosystems' is a metaphor inspired by natural ecosystems which describes a set of distributed, adaptive, and open socio-technical systems. Being parts of such ecosystems, individual persons, public and private organisations are becoming increasingly dependent on each other. When such cooperation moves beyond simple buying and selling of goods and well-defined services, there is a need ...

Science and technology at the nanoscale size offer today fundamental challenges in the field of device modeling. In this paper we document the growing interest of academies, institutions, and industries and the present impact on the market, and discuss different design strategies that have been proposed and/or implemented, aimed at the practical realization of innovative nanodevices. Few main e...

We introduce a model for studying the evolutionary dynamics of Poker. Notably, despite its wide diffusion and the raised scientific interest around it, Poker still represents an open challenge. Recent attempts for uncovering its real nature, based on statistical physics, showed that Poker in some conditions can be considered as a skill game. In addition, preliminary investigations reported a ne...

An important component in the fields of ecology and conservation biology is understanding the environmental conditions and geographic areas that are suitable for a given species to inhabit. A common tool in determining such areas is species distribution modeling which uses computer algorithms to determine the spatial distribution of organisms. Most commonly the correlative relationships between...

Development of scientific modeling software increasingly requires the coupling of multiple, independently developed models. Component-based software engineering enables the integration of plug-and-play components, but significant additional challenges must be addressed in any specific domain in order to produce a usable development and simulation environment that also encourages contributions a...

Comprehensibility in modeling is the ability of stakeholders to understand relevant aspects of the modeling process. In this article, we provide a framework to help guide exploration of the space of comprehensibility challenges. We consider facets organized around key questions: Who is comprehending? Why are they trying to comprehend? Where in the process are they trying to comprehend? How can ...

Computational Biology has increasingly become an important tool for biomedical and translational research. In particular, when generating novel hypothesis despite fundamental uncertainties in data and mechanistic understanding of biological processes underpinning diseases. While in the present book, we have reviewed the necessary background and existing novel methodologies that set the basis fo...

The speed and the versatility of today's computers open up new opportunities to simulate complex biological systems. Here we review a computational approach recently proposed by us to model large tumor cell populations and spheroids, and we put forward general considerations that apply to any fine-grained numerical model of tumors. We discuss ways to bypass computational limitations and discuss...

Agile Modeling provides a set of best practices of “light-weight” modeling to support the modeling process on a macro level within the agile development teams. The objective of this paper is to analyze the potential of using Enterprise Modeling in agile development projects to address some of the existing challenges of agile projects.