Volatility and correlation of Islamic and conventional indices during crises

We examine the correlation and volatility of Islamic indices and their conventional counterparts during the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis as well as the Covid-19 pandemic. We provide evidence that the volatility of Islamic indices is relatively lower than that of conventional peers during turmoil periods. Consistent with the decoupling hypothesis, our results indicate that the volatility of Islamic and the volatility of conventional indices tend to move in tandem in tranquil times but diverge in times of crises. Our results also indicate that the correlation between Islamic and conventional indices is a priced risk factor for Islamic index returns. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

A Web-Based System for Efficient Contact Tracing Query in a Large Spatio-Temporal Database

In this demonstration, we present a web based system for the novel contact tracing query (CTQ) that finds users who have come into direct contact with the query user or indirect contact via the already contacted users from a large spatio-temporal database. The CTQ is of paramount importance in the era of new COVID-19 pandemic world for identifying people who came into close spatial and temporal proximity with persons carrying an infectious disease. We demonstrate a multi-level index named QzR-tree, that considers the space coverage and the co-visiting patterns of the trajectories to group users who are likely to meet. More specifically, we use a quadtree to partition user movement traces along with a linear ordering and use the space-time mapping to group users with an R-tree. We develop a web-based demo system to show the effectiveness of the QzR-tree for the CTQ. The web-based system essentially uses a PostgreSQL database to store user trajectories, and indexes these trajectories using the QzR-tree, and finally uses a web interface to take user query and display the results in a map. © 2020 Owner/Author.