The Department of Informatics and Networked Systems is pleased to host its "DINS PhD Student Speaker Series," in which doctoral students discuss their research projects. Some of the featured projects represent (or contribute to) the doctoral dissertation work of these students and they benefit greatly from the opportunity to present their work to the public prior to defending their dissertations. Please join the Department on February 23, 2023, for presentations by Abhishek Viswanathan and Akshay Madan, beginning at 3:30 pm in Room 316 of the Information Sciences Building.
Engagement Forms in Local, Sensor-based, Environmental Citizen Science
Abhishek Viswanathan
In the Steel City, poor air quality due to the city’s industrial past and present continues to affect the health and well-being of Pittsburgh residents. There is a need to collect data on a granular level to understand the environmental conditions of specific neighborhoods, as well as communicate this information to residents in an accessible way. Community science is a promising approach to not only fill gaps in traditional environmental data sources, but also improve public understanding of the scientific process, increase community engagement, and enhance communities' potential for enrvironmental advocacy. This talk will cover three interconnected projects that Abhishek is working on:
- A pilot project where researchers worked with a local environmental non-profit (Upstream Pittsburgh) to engage residents of the Nine Mile Run watershed to collect and discuss environmental data using a Social Sensing System;
- Data Storytelling workshops that introduced participants to local data sources, easy-to-use visualization software (Tableau), and connected them to ongoing advocacy efforts and like-minded people to create Data Stories;
- Ongoing engagement with the non-profit Hazelwood Initiative, to install air quality monitors and address community concerns about air quality in the area.
BECT: Beacon-based Contact Tracing for Detecting Direct & Indirect Contacts
Akshay Madan
Digital Contact tracing with smartphone apps may help control the spread of serious pathogens, such as COVID-19. Such apps typically use peer-to-peer Bluetooth data transfer to record a contact. However, they suffer from low adoption rates, high false alarm contact indications, battery drain, and user privacy concerns. In this talk, I talk about BECT or BEacon-based Contact Tracing, which is a contact tracing framework using static Bluetooth beacon devices installed in public or private places. These beacons periodically communicate with the phones of the users giving them a token or a coin. The coins received by infected users are disseminated to all users and a match with an infected coin indicates that one may be infected. The BECT framework does not expose users’ private data and conserves the device's battery. We use MATLAB simulations to compare the performance of the BECT framework to phone-phone apps in a restaurant
scenario and show BECT has superior contact tracing performance. We also investigate various deployment configurations for the fixed beacons and provide general deployment guidelines.