Semantic Framework for Practicing Data Science in Public Health Organizations during the Covid-19 Pandemics

This paper proposes a semantic framework based on software architectures for accommodating data science practices to the needs of Public Health Organizations (PHO), during the covid-19 pandemics. The goal is to create an environment suitable for deploying data science on an ad-hoc basis, upon the selection of data generated by governments, non-government organizations, public databases and social media, but guided by PHO own needs and expertise. It is important to run predictions, through learning technologies, which may depend on circumstances and situations relevant for PHO in the particular moment and thus enable better decision making in the time of the pandemic. The proposed software architecture relies on its deployment within integrated development environments and plug-ins/APIs towards software tools, and libraries for (a) data gathering and preprocessing, (b) predictions with learning technologies (c) reasoning with semantic technologies and (d) including human intervention to aid in understanding the situation in which PHO questions may be answered. The illustration of the proposal is uses the sentiment analysis of twitter data relevant to covid-19 and classification of tweets with machine learning. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

COVID-19 pandemic and resilience in the agricultural sector: a local strategy may solve the global challenges

Agriculture remains a major engine of growth among the majority of developing and underdeveloped countries throughout the globe. But the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has severely affected all sectors of agribusiness industries. In many parts of the world agriculture production became almost half due to the impact of this pandemic. But in two Himalayan regions of India, Darjeeling and Sikkim, mixed effects were observed during the pandemic period. Although a large number of marginal farmers were severely affected during the lockdown and even in the unlock phases, while a significant number of farmers also gained nominal to a large amount of profit;chiefly because of reliability on complete organic farming including producing organic manure and bio-pesticides by the farmers themselves, lack of competition with imported agricultural commodities into the local market due to the inter-state travel ban, marketization of the agricultural products to the consumers through Farmers Producers Organizations (FPOs), NGOs and Sikkim State Co-operative Supply and Marketing Federation ltd. (SIMFED) and above all creation of the Farmers' Helpline at district levels by the local government bodies to solve the problems of the farmers even in the remotest regions.

Data analysis of Global Perceived Stress Scores during Covid-19

The Covid-19 Pandemic that broke out in late December 2019 has had a widespread negative effect on the mental health of people around the world. This work aims to elicit features that had a major influence on mental health during the pandemic to better understand preventive measures and remedial actions that can be taken to help individuals in need. Along with factors such as demographic age, gender, marital status, and employment status, additional information such as the effect of media used as a source of information, coping methods, trust in the country's government, and healthcare organizations was analyzed to find their correlation (if any) to the perceived stress of the individual. Machine Learning techniques such as XGBoost, AdaBoost, Decision Trees, Ordinal regression, k-Nearest Neighbors, Lasso and Ridge regression were used to arrive at a relationship between the perceived stress scores and the features considered. On interpreting results from the different models, we conclude that the main factor influencing stress scores was loneliness followed by features indicating trust in government, compliance with Covid-19 preventive measures and concerns regarding the pandemic. © 2022 IEEE.

Comparative Analysis of Security and Privacy Technique for Federated Learning in IOT Based Devices

The field of machine learning has been seen as a major development in the last few years. Many new algorithms and many new methods have been put forward by various researchers in this domain. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, things were done manually but after this situation, the culture of working from home has been started at almost every organization except few a necessary government organizations which include healthcare and other emergency services. Online work involves a lot of data transfer and hence it is demanded new development in machine learning and this learning emerged as one such development. Federated learning enables multiple devices to build a common machine learning model without sharing data which helps in providing better data privacy because training data are not transmitted to a central server. Federated learning is also known as collective learning where we train the algorithms across various devices with the help of decentralized data samples without the involvement of actual data. In this paper, the authors will provide various use cases, as well as a comparative study of various federated learning frameworks. This paper will provide in-depth knowledge as well as future research directions in the field of federated learning. © 2022 IEEE.

Issues on Japanese COVID-19 Exposure Notifications Application (COCOA)

This study investigates problems related to COCOA, which is a smartphone app officially provided by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) that is designed to notify users when they have been in close contact with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) positive persons, and thus help the government and healthcare organizations contain the spread of the virus. The information we have obtained thus far indicates that poor utilization rates of the app are due to significant program flaws, which caused the initial usage to be sluggish, as well as the failures of various health centers to adequately provide polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for COCOA notification recipients, which exacerbated sluggishness issues. Furthermore, a related survey revealed that although the government provides an integrated data system called the Health Center Real-time Information-sharing System on COVID-19 (Japanese abbreviation HER-SYS), information on fever outpatients (hospital names, locations, consultation times, presence or absence of PCR testing, etc.) corresponding to each local government is still not fully available. © 2022 IEEE.

Optimizing Scrum's Effectiveness in Distributed Software Development Environment during the Pandemic Era: A Systematic Literature Review

The event of the Covid-19 pandemic and the prerequisite for social distance has caused significant disturbances in the realm of work, including software development companies, including software development companies. The implementation of Work From Home (WFH) is a step taken by the government and private organizations to remain productive in the pandemic era. Currently, there are many methods that companies can implement to support the software development process. The Scrum method is part of agile methods that can speed up and adaptability in software development project management. This study discusses a systematic literature review on optimizing the effectiveness of Scrum in a distributed software development environment during the pandemic era. Using data systematically extracted from this work, we offer a strategy to increase the effectiveness of Scrum implementations in a distributed software development environment during the pandemic era. This approach helps practitioners and researchers to better understand the problems of distributed software development projects and develop more effective project management solutions. © 2022 IEEE.

Epidemiology and alcohol-related monitoring in Italy and in the Regions. Evaluation of the National Observatory on Alcohol on the impact of the alcohol consumption in support for the implementation of the activities of the National Alcohol and Health Plan. Report 2022

The alcohol consumption is an important public health problem, classified in Europe as a third risk factor for disease and premature death after smoking and arterial hypertension. The National Observatory on Alcohol (ONA) evaluates and analyses every year the national databases and conducts monitoring on behalf of the Ministry of Health and in accordance with the National Statistical Plan and the activities of the "Alcohol monitoring system - SISMA" envisaged by the Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers of 3 March 2017 and by the recent start-up at ISS of the "central action" SISTIMAL aimed at the evaluation of implementation of national and regional alcohol that the Ministry of Health is committed in providing to World Health Organization (WHO). The ONA is the independent technical and scientific advisory body for the Ministries, the first Minister Office, the European Commission and the WHO. This report refers to 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic and shows the alcohol problems according to the new epidemiological scenarios redesigned by the COVID-19 emergency.

Blockchain-based Platform for Secure Sharing and Validation of Vaccination Certificates

The COVID-19 pandemic has recently emerged as a worldwide health emergency that necessitates coordinated international measures. To contain the virus's spread, governments and health organisations raced to develop vaccines that would lower Covid-19 morbidity, relieve pressure on healthcare systems, and allow economies to open. Following the COVID-19 vaccine, the vaccination certificate has been adopted to help the authorities formulate policies by controlling cross-border travelling. To address serious privacy concerns and eliminate the need for third parties to retain the trust and govern user data, in this paper, we leverage blockchain technologies in developing a secure and verifiable vaccination certificate. Our approach has the advantage of utilising a hybrid approach that implements different advanced technologies, such as the self-sovereignty concept, smart contracts and interPlanetary File System (IPFS). We rely on verifiable credentials paired with smart contracts to make decisions about who can access the system and provide on-chain verification and validation of the user and issuer DIDs. The approach was further analysed, with a focus on performance and security. Our analysis shows that our solution satisfies the security requirements for immunisation certificates. © 2021 IEEE.

Covid-19 digital Contact-tracing: A doorway to well-being or a backdoor to security vulnerabilities?

Digital Contact-tracing through mobile applications require gathering of location and other personal information of an individual by the government or private organizations and became an essential solution for moderating the pandemic and slackening lockdown measures. However, the moral and legal boundaries for such privacy-sensitive information reconnaissance procedure and the ambiguity in the security measures of such technologies has gained controversial reputation.In this work, we performed static profiling of 10 different Android Contact-tracing applications, developed by the health departments of 10 different states within the United States and studied possible security threats posed by them. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to heuristically analyze the users' attitude towards these applications to understand the user-perceived contribution of these apps towards their well-being. We collected user feedback for each of the apps and trained a logistic regression classifier on cleaned, pre-processed and vectorized texts to identify positive or negative outlook towards these apps. Using the confusion matrix, our predictive model showed up to 85% accuracy, 94% precision, 93% recall and 83% f1 score. in predicting the sentiments. The sentiment prediction shows, users in some states did find the apps to be helpful where some other states found them wasteful. Whereas, our static analysis shows none of the apps are malicious themselves but all of them request permission that can be abused to gain escalated privileges. © 2021 IEEE.

Use of RapidPro for remote collection of nutrition data during the drought emergency and COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe. What we know: The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting movement restrictions have challenged the collection of routine nutrition monitoring data, limiting the ability of countries to identify changes in the nutrition situation. What this article adds: The RapidPro data management system enabled the continuation of routine nutrition data collection in Zimbabwe in the COVID-19 context. A number of indicators were selected for weekly (instead of monthly) reporting in nutritionally vulnerable, drought prone districts. Village health workers (VHWs) and health facility staff were prompted weekly to submit data via the mobile phone short messaging service (SMS) which were automatically collated via RapidPro software and analysed regularly at national level. A national level monitoring and evaluation officer responsible for quality control followed up with districts and health staff if data discrepancies were noted. To date, over 9,146 VHWs provide reports using the RapidPro system;on average, 70% of responses were complete and correct. This system enabled near real-time screening data (Family mid-upper-arm circumference (MUAC)) and information on ready-to-use therapeutic feeding (RUTF) supplies that were used by the Nutrition Cluster for decision making and response planning to support continued wasting treatment services. Successful scale-up of RapidPro was as a result of strong government leadership, the inclusion of RapidPro activities in Ministry of Health activity plans and integration with national nutrition reporting systems. In due course, this data will be automated to feed directly into the Demographic Health and Information Survey verion two (DHIS2) data management platform.

COVID-19 health management and business continuity

Considering the world faces an unprecedented challenge with economies everywhere affected by the COVID-19 pandemic there was an extreme need for coming together to combat the COVID-19 pandemic bringing governments, organizations from across industries and individuals together to manage this global outbreak. From the early stages of pandemic escalation, SOCAR AQS realized that only diversified measures would minimize risks, fulfil the duty of care responsibilities and promote workforce resilience. The establishment of the COVID-19 crisis management team ensured the continuous application of a proactive risk-based approach aligned with governmental regulations on the ground of the most up to date local and international information including the industry best practices. Access to the offices for all relevant staff and visitors was minimized, and the specific procedure for work from home was developed. A combination of preventive measures at all worksites and transportation facilities is held through regular effective disinfection, health checks, continuous access to the required personal protection and hygiene facilities, maintaining social distancing, and careful tracing close contacts for all suspected cases. Health promotion to all staff is conducted through various communication means. Two-stage pre-mobilization COVID-19 screening was implemented through a comprehensive health questionnaire prior to commuting at the entrance of quarantine facilities. There was a week of individual isolation in the designated controlled quarantine facilities with optimal detectability of the virus by the fifth day followed by highly-specific PCR testing before entering operational worksites enables early revealing of an infection prior to its manifestation in the human body. Specific post-illness medical assessment is a key for individual healthy return to work is carried out. Considering vaccines as a critical new tool in the battle against COVID-19, vaccination of all offshore personnel is implemented. As an outcome, the entire process provided a prudent way to ensure the continuation of uninterrupted operations resulted in zero COVID-19 detection at the quarantine worksites by follow-up of suspected cases during first eight months of the pandemic fight in Azerbaijan. In conclusion, the abovementioned statement provides the guidelines for the workforce working on worksites or in offices, and clear expectations of the measures to be taken to ensure COVID-19 health management and smooth business continuity are maintained. Copyright 2021, Society of Petroleum Engineers