Why might I want to build a formal model for a respiratory virus?

Abstract

At the risk of giving a talk completely lacking structure, I’d like to jump around a bit and try to answer a few different questions:

1. How can formal modelling software, like CatColab, help people to better understand scientific models outside their expertise?
2. What do we mean when we say things like “categorical modelling can help make assumptions explicit”?
3. How can we allow for somewhat informal-looking diagrams to convey precise quantitative information?
4. What does it look like, in practice, to add new functionality to CatColab?

In reality, of course, I spent weeks before I realised that these were actually the questions that I was interested in, let alone before I was able to come up with some answers. Here, I’ll try to disentangle things a bit and present a cleaner story.

This talk will be split into two parts: the first 45 minutes will be for a general audience, followed by a 20 minute technical discussion with a brief coffee break in between.