track

31Mar

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

What Is Genomic Surveillance And Why We Need More Of It To Track Coronavirus Variants And Help End The COVID-19 Pandemic

“You can’t fix what you don’t measure” is a maxim in the business world. And it holds true in the world of public health as well. Sequencing the genetic code of virus samples taken from COVID-19 patients reveals how SARS-CoV-2 is spreading and changing. Nate Langer/UPMC, CC BY-ND Early in the pandemic, the United States struggled to meet the demand to test people for SARS-CoV-2. That failure meant officials didn’t know the true number of people who had COVID-19. They were left to respond to the pandemic without knowing how quickly it was spreading and what interventions minimized risks. Now the U.S. faces a similar issue with a different type of test: genetic sequencing. Unlike a COVID-19 test that diagnoses infection, genetic sequencing decodes the genome of SARS-CoV-2 virus in samples ...

People Who Attacked The US Capitol Building Are Being Track Down By Law Enforcement Using Technology

After rioters flooded the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, there was an immediate call for those who overran officers on the scene and swarmed the House and Senate floors, as well as congressional members’ personal offices, to be identified, arrested and prosecuted. The coordinated law enforcement response to this incident is massive. As researchers who study criminal justice, we see that law enforcement agencies are accessing large amounts of information via technological sources to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol building. High-definition security cameras, facial recognition technology, location services acquired from cellphones and third-party apps, and accessing archival evidence on social media are all used to identify perpetrators of crimes and tie them to specific places...

We’re measuring online conversation to track the social and mental health issues surfacing during the coronavirus pandemic

The big idea Social media posts and news reports are rich sources of data about people’s attitudes and behaviors. Using artificial intelligence techniques, it’s possible to sift through billions of words to discern trends in a population’s well-being, or social quality. Performing this analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing the damage the pandemic is doing to the social and psychological well-being of the U.S. At the AI Institute of the University of South Carolina, my colleagues and I have processed more than 700 million social media posts since the beginning of March and more than 700,000 news articles about the COVID-19 pandemic. We are monitoring these information sources to capture the evolving human experience in the U.S. during the pandemic. We have found troubling indi...