ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic required efficient allocation of public resources and transforming existing ways of societal functions. To manage any crisis, governments and public health researchers ex-ploit the information available to them in order to make informed decisions, also defined as situational awareness. Gathering situational awareness using so-cial media, has been functional to manage epidemics. Previous research focused on using discussions during periods of epidemic crises on social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook and developing NLP techniques to filter out important/relevant discussions from a huge corpus of messages and posts. Social media usage varies with internet penetration and other socio-economic factors, which might induce disparity in an-alyzing discussions across different geographies. How-ever, print media is a ubiquitous information source, irrespective of geography. Further, topics discussed in news articles are already 'newsworthy', while on social media 'newsworthiness' is a product of techno-social processes. Developing this fundamental difference, we study Twitter data during the second wave in India focused on six high-population cities with varied macro-economic factors. Through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, we further analyze two Indian newspapers during the same period and compare topics from both Twitter and the newspapers to evaluate sit-uational awareness around the second phase of COVID on each of these platforms. We conclude that factors like internet penetration and GDP in a specific city influence the discourse surrounding situational updates on social media. Thus, augmenting information from newspapers to information extracted from social media would provide a more comprehensive perspective in resource-deficit cities © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an interdisciplinary research agenda for understanding the impacts COVID-19 response has had on our use of technology. The widespread unprecedented mandates on social distancing have forced a large majority of nearly 330 million Americans to rely on technology for work, education, and crucial societal functions. Using the Ecology framework, this research agenda identifies the domains of influence for the use of technology—from the individual and community to the organizational and societal levels. This chapter proposes a series of questions focused on the framework and offers a catalog of research questions as a launchpad for future research. This agenda serves as a guide for scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the influence of technology on the expansion or reduction of vulnerabilities for socially marginalized populations. The findings of the review suggest an increase in research on meso-, exo-, techno-, and macro-level interventions of technology use during COVID-19 and that some marginalized populations are not researched as much as others. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Societal functions have stalled during COVID-19 to reduce its spread in the population. It has been shown that visits to different venues have a large effect on spreading the virus. Hence, population-level mobility interventions like reopening selective category of venues have been proposed, for example, opening schools and offices but preventing people from visiting restaurants. These measures, although help to mitigate infection, still fail to satisfy people's needs and hope of going back to normality. In this context, here we propose an individual level POI recommendation system that can recommend venues to users according to their preference and at the same time, can lead to as few infections as possible. The key idea behind the system is that the risk of getting infected grows with the number of unique customers that had visited the venue previously, and it is safer to visit a less crowded place during a specific time slot. We evaluate the proposed system using both theory and real check-in datasets from three cities. Based on simulation on real-world data, we present a surprising result: it is possible to recommend POIs in such a way that the total infected population reduces by up to 50% compared to that following original check-ins. This result is comparable to that when 50% of the visits are blocked, yet our method allows all check-in needs. © 2021 IEEE.