RAPID: Internet Traffic and Compliance with Government Stay-at-Home Measures

公共卫生措施，如隔离，留在家里和庇护所在家里被认为是有效的方法来限制传染病的传播。这项研究工作的动机是一个简单的观察-随着公民遵守这些措施，并转向电子学习和远程工作，人们希望看到日常网络流量模式的显着变化。该项目探讨了利用这种变化作为公民遵守呆在家里的措施的隐私保护代理的潜力。这项工作将利用全球内容分发网络（CDN）服务的Vantage，了解在不同地区正式封锁或居家政策生效之前和之后的需求变化。为了了解这些公共卫生措施和网络流量之间的关系，它将依赖于自然实验，其中治疗组（公共卫生措施到位）中的区域用户将与未治疗组中的类似用户进行匹配，以便有效地评估地理区域之间的合规性和网络流量变化。这项研究将使人们能够了解国家在家措施是如何工作的，并通过观察不同地区随着时间的推移的网络流量需求来表征合规程度，同时保护隐私。这项工作的结果将有助于为公共卫生当局提供一个基础，以证据为基础的分析其有效性。开发的工具和获得的数据将提供给社区。所有的研究成果将在以下网站http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/elpis/上公布。该网站将在研究工作完成后至少一年内保持开放状态。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Public health measures such as quarantine, stay-at-home and shelter-at-home are considered effective ways to limit the spread of infectious diseases. This research effort is motivated by a simple observation - as citizens comply with such measures and move to e-learning and to work remotely, one expects to see significant changes in daily network traffic patterns. This project explores the potential for using such changes as a privacy-preserving proxy of citizen compliance with stay-at-home-like measures. This effort will leverage the vantage point of a global content distribution network (CDN) service to understand changes on demand before and after official lockdowns or stay-at-home policies take effect at different locales. To understand the relation between these public health measures and network traffic, it will rely on natural experiments, in which users in a region in a treated group (where public health measures are in place) will be matched with similar users in an untreated group, in order to effectively assess compliance and network traffic changes across geographic regions. This research will enable understanding how state-at-home measures are working and characterizing the degree of compliance by observing network traffic demand in different regions over time, while preserving privacy. The results from this work will help provide public health authorities with a basis for an evidence-based analysis of their effectiveness. The tools developed and the derived data will be made available to the community. All research products will be made available at the following website http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/elpis/ The site will remain accessible for at least a year after the completion of the work.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.