2. June 2022, 13:00
“The core of our work is to recreate the world on the computer, with all its causality and its contradictions. We believe that there is no such thing as a good model, only as few bad ones as possible,” says simulation researcher Niki Popper, whose book “I’m just simulating !” will be released on June 13th. In it, together with the author Ursel Nenzig, he gives an insight into the world of simulation research.
Popper’s research results became known to a large audience through his analyzes during the corona pandemic. A population model developed in 2010 formed the basis for the computer simulation, which has contributed significantly to better assessing the course of the pandemic. “My team and I were able to draw on many years of experience in modeling health data: We programmed a model for the protection of the pneumococcal vaccination and calculated models for the spread of influenza,” comments Niki Popper on the starting position for March 2020. Shortly after On the outbreak of the pandemic, the scientists began to adapt the model to the corona virus. In 2021, Niki Popper was voted Austrian of the Year in the “Research” category.
In an interview with Elisabeth Scharang, the simulation researcher explains why we can never describe reality exactly and what can be derived from the complex population model. “We asked ourselves: Which people live where? How do they move? How do they interact? And in the next step: What other things are involved? How does medical care work, for example? How does energy supply? How does mobility? Just the fact , how people network – until a few years ago we would not have had a chance to build such a model because the necessary data did not exist.”
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Book: Niki Popper: I’m just simulating! Recorded by Ursel Nenzig. Amalthea Verlag, June 2022