Human Contact Networks and the mathematics of how diseases spread Jon Crowcroft, The Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge We have been studying epidemics for a very long time. There are some simple, elegant mathematical abstractions like the Susceptibility/Infectiousness/Recovery (SIR) model, and there is a large body of empirical work, including geo-information systems studies going back to the Ghost Maps of the Reverend Henry Whitehead and Dr. John Snow of the famed London Cholera Epidemic. In this talk, I will describe the current work making use of smart mobile devices to map human contact networks, and explicit and implicit self-reporting of symptoms, used to provide more detailed understanding of what is really go on, and further, potentially to influence the behaviour of the population to control the rate of spread of an epidemic.