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To combat the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, many new ways have been proposed on how to automate the process of finding infected people, also called contact tracing. A special focus was put on preserving the privacy of users. Bluetooth Low Energy as base technology has the most promising properties, so this survey focuses on automated contact tracing techniques using Bluetooth Low Energy. We define multiple classes of methods and identify two major groups: systems that rely on a server for finding new infections and systems that distribute this process. Existing approaches are systematically classified regarding security and privacy criteria.Copyright © 2021 ACM.
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We recently concluded a four-year University Leadership Initiative (ULI) project sponsored by NASA, which investigated multiple aviation communications technology areas aimed at enhancing future aviation safety. These areas were dual-band air-ground communications for air traffic management, detection and interdiction of small drones, and high-capacity terrestrial airport communications networking. In this paper we report on flight test results of our dual-band radios. These radios were designed to use a spectrally efficient multi-carrier modulation, filterbank multicarrier (FBMC), which we had previously shown to improve resilience to high-power distance measurement equipment (DME) adjacent-channel interference, in comparison to existing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes. In our NASA project, we designed the FBMC radios to extend performance even further, using the following techniques: (i) simultaneous dual-band transmission and reception;(ii) ground station (GS) spatial diversity;(iii) higher-order modulation for a factor of 5 capacity increase over QPSK;(iv) a Doppler-resilient option using a smaller number of subcarriers;and, (v) 5-MHz bandwidth C-band transmissions for an order of magnitude capacity increase over existing 500-kHz channel schemes. To our knowledge, these are novel achievements for civil aviation, and our flight test results attained a technology readiness level (TRL) of 5. In this paper we briefly describe the project history, in which we spent approximately one year working with Boeing to participate in one of their Eco-Demonstrator flight trials, and obtained special temporary authorizations to transmit in both the L-band and C-band, from the FAA, the FCC, and the DoD. When COVID-19 dispersed worldwide, Boeing was no longer able to support us, so we revised our plans and teamed with the South Carolina Civil Air Patrol (SC CAP) to conduct smaller-scale flight tests. This paper summarizes the radio designs and the novel features we employed, as well as analyses, computer simulations, and laboratory tests prior to terrestrial mobile testing, all of which culminated in our successful flight tests. We show example flight test results that serve as proof of concept for all the five aforementioned radio performance enhancements. Example results include signal-to-noise ratio and bit error ratio, diversity gains, and throughput gains through both higher-order modulation and wider bandwidth channels. We also report on some lessons learned, and some ideas for future advancement of our work. © 2023 IEEE.
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Web RTC can provide real time capabilities for multimedia applications like voice, video and data between peers by utilizing the open standards. With the onset of covid, video conferencing has become a need of the day. Optimization of bandwidth, and other features have become the necessity. In the current work, WebRTC protocols are built upon, to improve the connection and success rate, optimize the bitrate and reduce the frame rate. This improvement is carried out without visible or audible loss of clarity in the video sessions. The Session Description Protocol is utilized to accomplish this, and this would not have been possible using WebRTC APIs alone. N-to-N connection among peers is established in an optimized manner, so that the application does not engage an intermediate server to transfer media streams which has resulted in multi-fold improvement in bandwidth performance and also maximized the number of participants, without incurring the cost for an intermediate media server. Conventionally, an intermediate media server is used to stitch streams from various senders into a single stream and then sent to the receivers. Bandwidth utilization is reduced close to 100x with good visibility in the stream. Robust web application is achieved using the TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT) server. The proposed work has addressed multiple ways of optimizing for the video conferencing using WebRTC. © 2022 IEEE.
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Since 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and lockdown policy have changed our life drastically. Due to this, companies, offices, schools, etc. are running in online mode. Therefore, the demand for internet bandwidth is very popular nowadays. Due to an increase in demand for internet bandwidth and the availability of multihomed devices, multipath TCP (MPTCP), and e-adoption of emerging technology enhanced bandwidth by utilizing the bandwidth of all available networks simultaneously. This paper analyzes the working principle of the MPTCP so that each internet device can easily use MPTCP to achieve high bandwidth. Load distribution and its performance mainly depend on the congestion control algorithm and the packet scheduler. MPTCP has various existing packet scheduling algorithms and congestion control algorithms. Here, the authors compare the performance of MPTCP with each congestion control algorithm and packet scheduler one by one and try to find out the best-performing MPTCP. This paper also shows that the MPTCP helps COVID-19 patients in various aspects.
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The world is continuously moving at a fast pace and so is the technological advancements in it. It is a rule of the planet that there should be continuous improvements and advancements in all realms for the welfare of the mankind. In the recent times due to the pandemic and the Covid-19 virus, the style of living and completing one's work has changes drastically. The world has become highly virtual in nature. For each work that needs to be completed there are devices all around us and all of us are connected virtually, be it studies, office work, gaming or loads of other errands. There are various components that are crucial to the efficient operation of the virtual world. One important factor among these components is the network that helps us in connecting with one another. The whole system of the virtual world is highly reliable on the speed, bandwidth, and many other factors of the network that the users are using. The mobile network era started with One-G or just the G and currently is moving towards a 5G network. In this paper we will discuss about the 5G network, the technology it uses, the challenges that it is facing and the huge difference that it will bring about in the virtual and technological world. © 2022 IEEE.
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This paper addresses the problem of estimating the conditional survival function of the lifetime of the subjects experiencing the event (latency) in the mixture cure model when the cure status information is partially available. The approach of past work relies on the assumption that long-term survivors are unidentifiable because of right censoring. However, in some cases this assumption is invalid since some subjects are known to be cured, e.g., when a medical test ascertains that a disease has entirely disappeared after treatment. We propose a latency estimator that extends the nonparametric estimator studied in López-Cheda et al. (TEST 26(2):353-376, 2017b) to the case when the cure status is partially available. We establish the asymptotic normality distribution of the estimator, and illustrate its performance in a simulation study. Finally, the estimator is applied to a medical dataset to study the length of hospital stay of COVID-19 patients requiring intensive care.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Models, Statistical , Humans , Computer Simulation , Survival AnalysisABSTRACT
Video represents the majority of internet traffic today, driving a continual race between the generation of higher quality content, transmission of larger file sizes, and the development of network infrastructure. In addition, the recent COVID-19 pandemic fueled a surge in the use of video conferencing tools. Since videos take up considerable bandwidth ( ∼ 100 Kbps to a few Mbps), improved video compression can have a substantial impact on network performance for live and pre-recorded content, providing broader access to multimedia content worldwide. We present a novel video compression pipeline, called Txt2Vid, which dramatically reduces data transmission rates by compressing webcam videos ('talking-head videos') to a text transcript. The text is transmitted and decoded into a realistic reconstruction of the original video using recent advances in deep learning based voice cloning and lip syncing models. Our generative pipeline achieves two to three orders of magnitude reduction in the bitrate as compared to the standard audio-video codecs (encoders-decoders), while maintaining equivalent Quality-of-Experience based on a subjective evaluation by users ( n=242 ) in an online study. The Txt2Vid framework opens up the potential for creating novel applications such as enabling audio-video communication during poor internet connectivity, or in remote terrains with limited bandwidth. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/tpulkit/txt2vid.git. © 1983-2012 IEEE.
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Purpose: While Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is highly effective at preventing HIV, uptake is low among adolescents. In low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), peer mentors (PMs) are considered best practice to increase PrEP acceptability and uptake. Globally, COVID19 has shifted much education and training to virtual formats. Most young people in LMIC have cell phones. Our objective is to describe our experiences developing and delivering a mixed virtual/physical curriculum for training PrEP PMs. Methods: IRB and local research ethics committee approval was obtained. A literature search (PubMed, EBSCO, USAID website, and MedEd Portal) yielded one published curriculum for PrEP PMs. This curriculum was combined with locally developed HIV PM education modules to create a new curriculum, with planned virtual and physical sessions. Curriculum materials were reviewed and agreed upon by all authors. All sessions were delivered by authors, with the majority delivered by Americans. The first 4 hours were done virtually via Zoom, covering the basics of HIV, detailed information on PrEP, adolescent development, and confidentiality. The remaining sessions were held in person and covered expectations of PMs, basic family planning, research ethics, action planning, role playing, and a review of virtual topics. Feedback was solicited from the PMs after virtual training. A debriefing session was held with the five facilitators involved in training: 1 research staff and 1 physician investigator from Kenya, 1 research staff and 2 physician investigators from the US - all female. Results: All five PMs (aged 21 – 27) participated. One identified as female, and one as LGBTQ. Feedback was solicited via anonymous survey (n=3) after the virtual sessions and debriefing with Kenyan research staff. Respondents strongly agreed that the virtual training was worth their time. Although PMs felt they were able to learn in the virtual format, facilitators noted more engagement during in-person sessions. Facilitators noted the importance of introductions and challenges of building cohesiveness for virtual sessions, particularly with sensitive content and internet limitations restricting video use (eg. low bandwidth, use of cell phones). Kenyan investigators noted that the Kenyan educational system is hierarchical, with students largely learning passively. They felt that this, combined with the newness of virtual learning and minimal dedicated time for introductions, may have hampered active virtual participation. While no PMs pointed to race or accent as limitations, facilitators noted differences between American and Kenyan English idioms, cadence, speed, and pronunciation that may have caused difficulty. Given Kenya's history of colonialism, all raised concerns that PMs may have been more deferential to light-skinned, foreign facilitators. Facilitators who observed both virtual and in-person sessions felt it was easier to break barriers of colonialism and assess for differences in spoken English in person. Facilitators felt that if virtual training were to be used in the future, it would be beneficial to have physical sessions first to set an interactive, educational tone and allow participants to build rapport. Conclusions: Virtual delivery of PM educator training in a LMIC setting is difficult and requires careful consideration or technological limitations and culture. Sources of Support: Indiana CTSI;Grant Number UL1RR025761-01.
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The demand for the telecommunication services, such as IP telephony, has increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. IP telephony should be enhanced to provide the expected quality. One of the issues that should be investigated in IP telephony is bandwidth utilization. IP telephony produces very small speech samples attached to a large packet header. The header of the IP telephony consumes a considerable share of the bandwidth allotted to the IP telephony. This wastes the network's bandwidth and influences the IP telephony quality. This paper proposes a mechanism (called Smallerize) that reduces the bandwidth consumed by both the speech sample and the header. This is achieved by assembling numerous IP telephony packets in one header and use the header's fields to carry the speech sample. Several metrics have been used to measure the achievement Smallerize mechanism. The number of calls has been increased by 245.1% compared to the typical mechanism. The bandwidth saving has also reached 68% with the G.28 codec. Therefore, Smallerize is a possible mechanism to enhance bandwidth utilization of the IP telephony. © 2023 CRL Publishing. All rights reserved.
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Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic resulted in more than six million deaths in the first two years, a third of the estimated number of cancer-related deaths during this time. It directly impacted radiotherapy training in Africa. Aim(s): This study evaluated the changes applied to the Access to Care Cape Town Radiotherapy training programme during the pandemic. Setting(s): The training platform prior to March 2020 was used as a baseline and compared with the programme status in January 2022, representing the emergency teaching model. Method(s): Five themes were investigated: computer hardware and software changes;e-Learning resources;programme and curriculum changes;challenges experienced and alignment with modern medical education principles. Result(s): Reconfiguration of the computer laboratories was required, including additional computer monitors, web cameras and headsets, as well as installation of screen recording and teleconferencing software. The EclipseTM radiotherapy treatment planning laboratory was reconfigured for remote student access, with simultaneous monitoring by local assistants. Online learning was augmented by adding the University of Cape Town VulaTM system as resource, and courses restructured for delivery of short blocks. Five new courses were developed, including collaborations with international training partners, showing good alignment with the principles of modern medical education. Conclusion(s): Reconfiguration was performed at a manageable cost but required a high level of information technology support. Connectivity and bandwidth issues remain a challenge, as well as online engagement. Contribution: Despite these challenges, the virtualisation allowed for continued training between March 2020 and December 2021, with 18 departments attending remote teaching courses. Copyright © 2022. The Authors.
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Higher education across the world during the COVID pandemic changes its knowledge delivery mode from on-campus studies to off-campus studies, i.e. E-Learning. The e-education provider must be competent in order to create a robust learning environment that can handle the difficulties facing teachers, students, and system administrators at this rapid pace of change. The system administrator needs to improve the network connectivity, bandwidth etc. for providing seamless connectivity for E-Learning alongside their campus network services. The challenge of providing smooth services for e-learning is sometimes hurdled the other network services for the campus and therefore the management and administrator suggest deploying the e-learning services on the cloud and setting apart the campus network services. This will solve the problem of available network limits can face by the institute due to the limited amount of hardware and bandwidth issues. Furthermore, the cloud deployment reduces the capital as well as the recurring cost of running the services. This paper will focus to address the problem defined above and providing Amazon Web Services (AWS) based cost-effective cloud architecture for OpenedX based learning solutions. This study is expected to demonstrate a technological solution for the process of implementing a cloud-based LMS. © 2022 IEEE.
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The following paper presents L2Ork Tweeter, a new control-data-driven free and open source crowdsourced telematic musicking platform and a new interface for musical expression that deterministically addresses three of the greatest challenges associated with the telematic music medium, that of latency, sync, and bandwidth. Motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Tweeter's introduction in April 2020 has ensured uninterrupted operation of Virginia Tech's Linux Laptop Orchestra (L2Ork), resulting in 6 international performances over the past 18 months. In addition to enabling tightly-timed sync between clients, it also uniquely supports all stages of NIME-centric telematic musicking, from collaborative instrument design and instruction, to improvisation, composition, rehearsal, and performance, including audience participation. Tweeter is also envisioned as a prototype for the crowdsourced approach to telematic musicking. Below, the paper delves deeper into motivation, constraints, design and implementation, and the observed impact as an applied instance of a proposed paradigm-shift in telematic musicking and its newfound identity fueled by the live crowdsourced telematic music genre. © 2022, International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. All rights reserved.
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Internet content providers often deliver content through bandwidth bottlenecks that are out of their control. Thus, despite often having massively over-provisioned upstream servers, the content providers still cannot control the end-to-end user experience. This paper explores remote traffic shaping, allowing the content provider to allocate its share of a remote bottleneck link across its users using a metric other than TCP fairness, while remaining TCP-friendly to cross traffic on the bottleneck link. To evaluate this approach, we designed FlowTele, the first system that shapes outbound traffic on an Internet-scale network to optimize provider-selected metrics, using source control with neither in-network support nor special client support. Our extensive evaluations over the Internet show that by strategically reallocating bandwidth among provider-owned co-bottlenecked flows, FlowTele improves the provider's total revenue by roughly 20% - 30% in various network settings, compared with both (i) status quo TCP fairshare and (ii) recent practice by content providers that proactively throttles video quality during the COVID-19 pandemic, while being TCP-friendly to cross-traffic. Besides revenue, we also study other metrics, such as QoE fairness, that a content provider may wish to optimize using FlowTele. © 2022 Owner/Author.
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Video streaming market has been growing rapidly for the past two decades. YouTube and Netflix, for example, are part of everyday life for many of us. Although network bandwidth has increased with the development of 5G and fiber, user demand and expectations have also increased with 4K videos, larger screens, and COVID-19. Recent explosive increase in video traffic made it difficult for the network and applications to satisfy the user requirements of video streaming. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a promising technology to resolve this problem. MEC is a network architecture concept that offers cloud-computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the network. In this paper, we review the research efforts in video streaming with MEC over the past few years. We have clustered and categorized the literature according to the optimization criteria, with focus on cache management. We aim this survey to be a cornerstone for designing effective novel caching scheme in MEC for video streaming. © 2022 IEEE.
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The global spread of coronavirus has sparked a considerable interest in technologies that facilitate seamless communication between users which are physically or spatially distant. Using current remote collaboration systems that utilize 3D sensing with LiDAR and depth cameras, point cloud streaming, and MR/VR devices, distant users can communicate with each other as if they did in person. However, these systems may violate users' privacy since they can share information of their entire personal space with other users. In addition, although various point cloud compression methods have been proposed, remote transmission of 3D scenes still requires significant bandwidth. This paper proposes a 3D spatial data sharing system based on the paradigm of 'semantic communication', i.e., controlling communication in the units of semantic objects. Our system understands the semantics of the scene and leverages point cloud streaming, thereby enabling users to assert fine-grained control over their privacy. Further, the system adaptively controls the size of the data frame based on network capacity and scene context. The experimental results show that the network delay can be reduced by 96%. We have also tested our system in a commercial 4G network, showing that 3-D spatial sharing with point clouds over severe networks is possible. © 2022 IEEE.
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Video represents the majority of internet traffic today, driving a continual race between the generation of higher quality content, transmission of larger file sizes, and the development of network infrastructure. In addition, the recent COVID-19 pandemic fueled a surge in the use of video conferencing tools. Since videos take up considerable bandwidth (~100 Kbps to a few Mbps), improved video compression can have a substantial impact on network performance for live and pre-recorded content, providing broader access to multimedia content worldwide. We present a novel video compression pipeline, called Txt2Vid, which dramatically reduces data transmission rates by compressing webcam videos (“talking-head videos”) to a text transcript. The text is transmitted and decoded into a realistic reconstruction of the original video using recent advances in deep learning based voice cloning and lip syncing models. Our generative pipeline achieves two to three orders of magnitude reduction in the bitrate as compared to the standard audio-video codecs (encoders-decoders), while maintaining equivalent Quality-of-Experience based on a subjective evaluation by users (n = 242) in an online study. The Txt2Vid framework opens up the potential for creating novel applications such as enabling audio-video communication during poor internet connectivity, or in remote terrains with limited bandwidth. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/tpulkit/txt2vid.git. IEEE
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Genome analysis benefits precise medical care, wildlife conservation, pandemic treatment (e.g., COVID-19), and so on. Unfortunately, in genome analysis, the speed of data processing lags far behind the speed of data generation. Thus, hardware acceleration turns out to be necessary. As many applications in genome analysis are memory-bound, Processing-In-Memory (PIM) and Near-Data-Processing (NDP) solutions have been explored to tackle this problem. In particular, the Dual-Inline-Memory-Module (DIMM) based designs are very promising due to their non-invasive feature to the cost-sensitive DRAM dies. However, they have two critical limitations, i.e., performance bottle-necked by communication and the limited potential for memory expansion. In this paper, we address these two limitations by designing novel DIMM based accelerators located near the dis-aggregated memory pool with the support from the Compute Express Link (CXL), aiming to leverage the abundant memory within the memory pool and the high communication bandwidth provided by CXL. We propose BEACON, Scalable Near-Data-Processing Accelerators for Genome Analysis near Memory Pool with the CXL Support. BEAC-ON ad-opts a software-hardware co-design approach to tackle the above two limitations. The BEACON architecture builds the foundation for efficient communication and memory expansion by reducing data movement and leveraging the high communication bandwidth provided by CXL. Based on the BEACON architecture, we propose a memory management framework to enable memory expansion with unmodified CXL-DIMMs and further optimize communication by improving data locality. We also propose algorithm-specific optimizations to further boost the performance of BEACON. In addition, BEACON provides two design choices, i.e., BEACON- D and BEACON-S. BEACON-D and BEACON-S perform the computation within the enhanced CXL-DIMMs and enhanced CXL-Switches, respectively. Experimental results show that compared with state-of-the-art DIMM based NDP accelerators, on average, BEACON-D and BEACON-S improve the performance by 4. 70x and 4. 13x, respectively. © 2022 IEEE.
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"In this paper, we introduce ""Lamphone,"" an optical side-channel attack used to recover sound from desk lamp light bulbs;such lamps are commonly used in home offices, which became a primary work setting during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show how fluctuations in the air pressure on the surface of a light bulb, which occur in response to sound and cause the bulb to vibrate very slightly (a millidegree vibration), can be exploited by eavesdroppers to recover speech passively, externally, and using equipment that provides no indication regarding its application. We analyze a light bulb's response to sound via an electro-optical sensor and learn how to isolate the audio signal from the optical signal. We compare Lamphone to related methods presented in other studies and show that Lamphone can recover sound at high quality and lower volume levels that those methods. Finally, we show that eavesdroppers can apply Lamphone in order to recover speech at the sound level of a virtual meeting with fair intelligibility when the victim is sitting/working at a desk that contains a desk lamp with a light bulb from a distance of 35 meters."
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Background: With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, Higher Education Organizations (HEOs), including medical schools, started using online education to effectively teach, and evaluate students’ performances. An increasingly popular contemporary modality offered by the digital e-learning market is a Learning Management System (LMS). Aims and Objectives: The aim isto assess Moodle v. 3.9 as a tool to conduct online medical examinations. The objectives are: 1. To collect student feedback 2. To discuss technical aspects with Moodle experts 3. To implement necessary changes based on the feedback and discussion Material and Methods: A short-term longitudinal observational study was conducted at the Symbiosis Medical College for Women, Pune, India to collect feedback from 143 students with regards to their online exam experience with Moodle and the technical difficulties they faced were noted. In collaboration with software experts, certain technical changes pertaining to bandwidth requirements were implemented. Results: We observed that the students require extra time as compared to the online exam scenario for conversion of their answer sheets into PDFs, and this technical aspect needs to be considered while designing such exams. We also established the server bandwidth that is essential for an uninterrupted online exam experience at the institute level. Lastly, student feedback suggested that the online examination environment is perceived as more stressful, compared to its live counterpart. Conclusion: We conclude that cost-effectiveness, user-friendly interface, and a multitude of assessment-related features make Moodle an efficient tool for conducting online medical examinationsattheundergraduatelevel.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic and mandated global lockdowns, people and businesses started the extensive use of video-conferencing applications for staying connected. This surge in demand and the usability of video-conferencing services has been severely overlooked in developing countries like South Africa, where one-third of adults rely on mobile devices to access the internet, and the per-gigabyte data cost is among the highest in Africa. Considering these numbers, we conduct a two-pronged study where 1) we measure data consumption of different Android apps through data measurement experiments and 2) we conduct interviews and usability assessments with bandwidth-constrained users to better understand the usability and Quality of Experience (QoE) of mobile video-conferencing apps. Usability is the degree to which specified users can use a product to achieve specified goals. In contrast, QoE measures the subjective perception of the quality of an application and the level of delight or annoyance with a service. The key benefit of this study will be to inform organisations that seek to be inclusive about these tools’ relative usability by letting them know about the factors influencing users’ QoE. © 2022, EasyChair. All rights reserved.