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This special issue includes research papers related to a workshop held at the Royal Society on 21st of September 2010, honouring Erol Gelenbe on his 65th birthday. The workshop brought together some 40 participants including some of Erol's former and current PhD students, colleagues and friends with whom he has interacted over the years, both in Europe and the USA. The papers focus on probability models in computer science, at the core of the field of computer performance engineering, which Erol pioneered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invasive woodland pests have substantial ecological, economic, and social impacts, harming biodiversity and ecosystem services. Mathematical modelling informed by Bayesian inference can deepen our understanding of the fundamental behaviours of invasive pests and provide predictive tools for forecasting future spread. A key invasive pest of concern in the UK is the oak processionary moth (OPM). OPM was established in the UK in 2006; it is harmful to both oak trees and humans, and its infestation area is continually expanding. Here, we use a computational inference scheme to estimate the parameters for a two-node network epidemic model to describe the temporal dynamics of OPM in two geographically neighbouring parks (Bushy Park and Richmond Park, London). We show the applicability of such a network model to describing invasive pest dynamics and our results suggest that the infestation within Richmond Park has largely driven the infestation within Bushy Park. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the severe impact of COVID-19 on several societal levels, it is of crucial importance to model the impact of restriction measures on the pandemic evolution, so that governments are able to make informed decisions. Even though there have been countless attempts to propose diverse models since the rise of the outbreak, the increase in data availability and start of vaccination campaigns calls for updated models and studies. Furthermore, most of the works are focused on a very particular place or application and we strive to attain a more general model, resorting to data from different countries. In particular, we compare Great Britain and Israel, two highly different scenarios in terms of vaccination plans and social structure. We build a network-based model, complex enough to model different scenarios of government-mandated restrictions, but generic enough to be applied to any population. To ease the computational load we propose a decomposition strategy for our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]