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Exposure notification applications are designed to help trace disease spreading by alerting exposed individuals to get tested. However, false alarms can cause users to become hesitant to respond, making the applications ineffective. To address the shortcomings of slow manual contact tracing, costly lockdowns, and unreliable exposure notification applications, better disease mitigation strategies are needed. In this paper, we propose a new disease mitigation paradigm where people can reduce infection spreading while maintaining some mobility (i.e., Quarantine in Motion). Our approach utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to predict disease hotspots such as restaurants, shops and parks, and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to collaboratively manage human mobility to reduce disease transmission. As proof of concept, we simulate an infection using real-world mobility data from New York City (over 200,000 devices) and Austin (over 36,000 devices) and train 10,000 agents from each city to manage disease dynamics. Through simulation, we show that a trained population suppresses their reproduction rate below 1, thereby mitigating the outbreak.
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Pruning digital contact networks for meso-scale epidemic surveillance using foursquare data
With the recent advances in human sensing, the push to integrate human mobility tracking with epidemic modeling highlights the lack of groundwork at the mesoscale (e.g., city-level) for both contact tracing and transmission dynamics. Although GPS data has been used to study city-level outbreaks in the past, existing approaches fail to capture the path of infection at the individual level. Consequently, in this paper, we extend epidemics prediction from estimating the size of an outbreak at the population level to estimating the individuals who may likely get infected within a finite period of time. To this end, we propose a network science based method to first build and then prune the dynamic contact networks for recurring interactions; these networks can serve as the backbone topology for mechanistic epidemics modeling. We test our method using Foursquare’s Points of Interest (POI) smart phone geolocation data from over 1.3 million devices to better approximate the COVID-19 infection curves for two major (yet very different) US cities, (i.e., Austin and New York City), while maintaining the granularity of individual transmissions and reducing model uncertainty. Our method provides a foundation for building a disease prediction framework at the mesoscale that can help both policy makers and individuals better understand their estimated state of health and help the pandemic mitigation efforts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2107085
- PAR ID:
- 10356238
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '21)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 423 to 430
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3487351.3490971
