Network interventions for managing the COVID-19 pandemic and sustaining economy.

Sustaining economic activities while curbing the number of new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases until effective vaccines or treatments become available is a major public health and policy challenge. In this paper, we use agent-based simulations of a network-based susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model to investigate two network intervention strategies for mitigating the spread of transmission while maintaining economic activities. In the simulations, we assume that people engage in group activities in multiple sectors (e.g., going to work, going to a local grocery store), where they interact with others in the same group and potentially become infected. In the first strategy, each group is divided into two subgroups (e.g., a group of customers can only go to the grocery store in the morning, while another separate group of customers can only go in the afternoon). In the second strategy, we balance the number of group members across different groups within the same sector (e.g., every grocery store has the same number of customers). The simulation results show that the dividing groups strategy substantially reduces transmission, and the joint implementation of the two strategies could effectively bring the spread of transmission under control (i.e., effective reproduction number ≈ 1.0).

Privacy Aware Incentivization for Participatory Sensing.

Participatory sensing is a process whereby mobile device users (or participants) collect environmental data on behalf of a service provider who can then build a service based upon these data. To attract submissions of such data, the service provider will often need to incentivize potential participants by offering a reward. However, for the privacy conscious, the attractiveness of such rewards may be offset by the fact that the receipt of a reward requires users to either divulge their real identity or provide a traceable pseudonym. An incentivization mechanism must therefore facilitate data submission and rewarding in a way that does not violate participant privacy. This paper presents Privacy-Aware Incentivization (PAI), a decentralized peer-to-peer exchange platform that enables the following: (i) Anonymous, unlinkable and protected data submission; (ii) Adaptive, tunable and incentive-compatible reward computation; (iii) Anonymous and untraceable reward allocation and spending. PAI makes rewards allocated to a participant untraceable and unlinkable and incorporates an adaptive and tunable incentivization mechanism which ensures that real-time rewards reflect current environmental conditions and the importance of the data being sought. The allocation of rewards to data submissions only if they are truthful (i.e., incentive compatibility) is also facilitated in a privacy-preserving manner. The approach is evaluated using proofs and experiments.