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

公共卫生措施，如隔离、待在家中和住所，被认为是限制传染病传播的有效方法。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，人们预计会看到日常网络流量模式发生重大变化。这个项目探索了利用这种变化作为公民遵守类似呆在家里的措施的隐私保护代理的可能性。这项工作将利用全球内容分发网络(CDN)服务的优势，了解在官方封锁或在家呆政策在不同地点生效之前和之后的需求变化。为了了解这些公共卫生措施与网络流量之间的关系，它将依靠自然实验，即将治疗组(已实施公共卫生措施)中某个地区的用户与未治疗组中的类似用户进行匹配，以便有效地评估跨地理区域的遵从性和网络流量变化。这项研究将通过观察不同地区随着时间的推移的网络流量需求，了解在家状态措施是如何发挥作用的，并表征合规性程度，同时保护隐私。这项工作的结果将有助于为公共卫生当局对其有效性进行循证分析提供依据。开发的工具和派生的数据将向社区提供。所有研究成果将在以下网站上提供http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/elpis/该网站将在工作完成后至少一年内保持可访问。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.