The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged the traditional public health balance between benefiting the good of the community through contact tracing and restricting individual ...liberty. This article first analyzes important technical and ethical issues regarding new smartphone apps that facilitate contact tracing and exposure notification. It then presents a framework for assessing contact tracing, whether manual or digital: the effectiveness at mitigating the pandemic; acceptability of risks, particularly privacy; and equitable distribution of benefits and risks. Both manual and digital contact tracing require public trust, engagement of minority communities, prompt COVID-19 testing and return of results, and high adherence with physical distancing and use of masks.
Humans’ ability to transfer knowledge through teaching is one of the essential aspects for human intelligence. A human teacher can track the knowledge of students to customize the teaching on ...students’ needs. With the rise of online education platforms, there is a similar need for machines to track the knowledge of students and tailor their learning experience. This is known as the Knowledge Tracing (KT) problem in the literature. Effectively solving the KT problem would unlock the potential of computer-aided education applications such as intelligent tutoring systems, curriculum learning, and learning materials’ recommendation. Moreover, from a more general viewpoint, a student may represent any kind of intelligent agents including both human and artificial agents. Thus, the potential of KT can be extended to any machine teaching application scenarios which seek for customizing the learning experience for a student agent (i.e., a machine learning model). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey for the KT literature. We cover a broad range of methods starting from the early attempts to the recent state-of-the-art methods using deep learning, while highlighting the theoretical aspects of models and the characteristics of benchmark datasets. Besides these, we shed light on key modelling differences between closely related methods and summarize them in an easy-to-understand format. Finally, we discuss current research gaps in the KT literature and possible future research and application directions.
Knowledge tracing for evaluating students' knowledge is an essential task in personalized education. More and more researchers have devoted themselves to solving knowledge tracing tasks, e.g., deep ...knowledge tracing, which can capture more sophisticated representations of student knowledge. Nonetheless, these techniques ignore the reconstruction of the observed input information. Therefore, this leads to poor predictions of students' knowledge, even if the student performed well in the past knowledge state. In this paper, we first employ causal inference for explanatory analysis of knowledge tracing, then propose a learning algorithm for stable knowledge tracing based on the analysis outcomes. The proposed approach aims to achieve stable knowledge tracing by constructing global balanced weights that facilitate estimating feature influence and assessing causal relationships between individual variables and outcome variables. We have proved the approach has effective in accuracy and interpretability through extensive experimentation on real-world datasets. In conclusion, this paper has methodological implications for the stable assessment of students' knowledge and provides a reference for personalization and use of intelligence in the educational teaching process.
Digital contact tracing is a relevant tool to control infectious disease outbreaks, including the COVID-19 epidemic. Early work evaluating digital contact tracing omitted important features and ...heterogeneities of real-world contact patterns influencing contagion dynamics. We fill this gap with a modeling framework informed by empirical high-resolution contact data to analyze the impact of digital contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigate how well contact tracing apps, coupled with the quarantine of identified contacts, can mitigate the spread in real environments. We find that restrictive policies are more effective in containing the epidemic but come at the cost of unnecessary large-scale quarantines. Policy evaluation through their efficiency and cost results in optimized solutions which only consider contacts longer than 15-20 minutes and closer than 2-3 meters to be at risk. Our results show that isolation and tracing can help control re-emerging outbreaks when some conditions are met: (i) a reduction of the reproductive number through masks and physical distance; (ii) a low-delay isolation of infected individuals; (iii) a high compliance. Finally, we observe the inefficacy of a less privacy-preserving tracing involving second order contacts. Our results may inform digital contact tracing efforts currently being implemented across several countries worldwide.
In the wake of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), contact tracing has become a key element of strategies to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 ...(SARS-CoV-2). Given the rapid and intense spread of SARS-CoV-2, digital contact tracing has emerged as a potential complementary tool to support containment and mitigation efforts. Early modelling studies highlighted the potential of digital contact tracing to break transmission chains, and Google and Apple subsequently developed the Exposure Notification (EN) framework, making it available to the vast majority of smartphones. A growing number of governments have launched or announced EN-based contact tracing apps, but their effectiveness remains unknown. Here, we report early findings of the digital contact tracing app deployment in Switzerland. We demonstrate proof-of-principle that digital contact tracing reaches exposed contacts, who then test positive for SARS-CoV-2. This indicates that digital contact tracing is an effective complementary tool for controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Continued technical improvement and international compatibility can further increase the efficacy, particularly also across country borders.
Corona contact tracing apps are a novel and promising measure to reduce the spread of COVID-19. They can help to balance the need to maintain normal life and economic activities as much as possible ...while still avoiding exponentially growing case numbers. However, a majority of citizens need to be willing to install such an app for it to be effective. Hence, knowledge about drivers for app uptake is crucial.
This study aimed to add to our understanding of underlying psychological factors motivating app uptake. More specifically, we investigated the role of concern for one's own health and concern to unknowingly infect others.
A two-wave survey with 346 German-speaking participants from Switzerland and Germany was conducted. We measured the uptake of two decentralized contact tracing apps officially launched by governments (Corona-Warn-App, Germany; SwissCovid, Switzerland), as well as concerns regarding COVID-19 and control variables.
Controlling for demographic variables and general attitudes toward the government and the pandemic, logistic regression analysis showed a significant effect of self-focused concerns (odds ratio OR 1.64, P=.002). Meanwhile, concern of unknowingly infecting others did not contribute significantly to the prediction of app uptake over and above concern for one's own health (OR 1.01, P=.92). Longitudinal analyses replicated this pattern and showed no support for the possibility that app uptake provokes changes in levels of concern. Testing for a curvilinear relationship, there was no evidence that "too much" concern leads to defensive reactions and reduces app uptake.
As one of the first studies to assess the installation of already launched corona tracing apps, this study extends our knowledge of the motivational landscape of app uptake. Based on this, practical implications for communication strategies and app design are discussed.
Until a vaccine is developed, a test, trace and isolate strategy is the most effective method of controlling the COVID-19 outbreak. Contact tracing and case isolation are common methods for ...controlling infectious disease outbreaks. However, the effectiveness of any contact tracing system rests on public engagement. Numerous factors may influence an individual's willingness to engage with a contact tracing system. Understanding these factors has become urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To identify facilitators and barriers to uptake of, and engagement with, contact tracing during infectious disease outbreaks.
A rapid systematic review was conducted to identify papers based on primary research, written in English, and that assessed facilitators, barriers, and other factors associated with the uptake of, and engagement with, a contact tracing system.
Four themes were identified as facilitators to the uptake of, and engagement with, contact tracing: collective responsibility; personal benefit; co-production of contact tracing systems; and the perception of the system as efficient, rigorous and reliable. Five themes were identified as barriers to the uptake of, and engagement with, contact tracing: privacy concerns; mistrust and/or apprehension; unmet need for more information and support; fear of stigmatization; and mode-specific challenges.
By focusing on the factors that have been identified, contact tracing services are more likely to get people to engage with them, identify more potentially ill contacts, and reduce transmission.
With no approved vaccines for treating COVID-19 as of August 2020, many health systems and governments rely on contact tracing as one of the prevention and containment methods. However, there have ...been instances when the infected person forgets his/her contact-persons and does not have their contact details. Therefore, this study aimed at analyzing possible opportunities and challenges of integrating emerging technologies into COVID-19 contact tracing.
The study applied literature search from Google Scholar, Science Direct, PubMed, Web of Science, IEEE and WHO COVID-19 reports and guidelines analyzed.
While the integration of technology-based contact tracing applications to combat COVID-19 and break transmission chains promise to yield better results, these technologies face challenges such as technical limitations, dealing with asymptomatic individuals, lack of supporting ICT infrastructure and electronic health policy, socio-economic inequalities, deactivation of mobile devices’ WIFI, GPS services, interoperability and standardization issues, security risks, privacy issues, political and structural responses, ethical and legal risks, consent and voluntariness, abuse of contact tracing apps, and discrimination.
Integrating emerging technologies into COVID-19 contact tracing is seen as a viable option that policymakers, health practitioners and IT technocrats need to seriously consider in mitigating the spread of coronavirus. Further research is also required on how best to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the utilisation of emerging technologies in contact tracing while observing the security and privacy of people in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
•With no approved vaccines, health systems rely on contact tracing to prevent the spread of COVID-19.•Technology-based contact tracing applications can counter the above-mentioned problem and facilitate contact tracing.•These applications can use GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Social graph and Card transaction data to track users.
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