Page 118 - ITU Journal, Future and evolving technologies - Volume 1 (2020), Issue 1, Inaugural issue
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ITU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies, Volume 1 (2020), Issue 1
of detection and false alarms. The idea is to use possibly
disparate wireless data streams for data collection, then
1000
integrate this data to improve coverage, reduce probabil-
900
800 ities of errors and false alarms and create a susceptibility
graph that could be used for intelligent testing. Based
num of cumulative infections 600 on this susceptibility graph, we show how to develop
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efficient sequential learning based algorithms in order
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to minimize the spread of the virus infection. Another
contribution is that we develop provably optimal algo-
400
300
observable Markov decision processes. In particular, we
policy 1
200 no tracing rithmic solutions that rely upon the theory of partially
policy 2 with p = 0.02
b show that current contact tracing plus testing strategies
100 policy 2 with p = 0.2
b
policy 2 with adaptive p that are aimed at identifying (and testing) individuals
b
0 50 100 150 with the highest probability of infection are inefficient.
days
Instead, we find that it is better to test those individuals
Fig. 2 – Simulation of the spreading of the virus under different whose expected impact on virus spread is the highest.
tracing policies. We formulate the testing problem as a Partially Observ-
which is approximately the entire population. Even able Markov Decision Process whose goal is to minimize
a simple contact tracing technique such as Policy 1, the expected spread of the virus subject to testing ca-
reduces the total infections to 617 (which is a 37% pacity constraints. We provide efficient algorithmic so-
reduction). Thus, it is worth the effort to establish lutions to this problem and show via numerical results
a system that can track the contacts of the people that our solution substantially reduces the spread of the
in order to better detect the infections. virus.
• Compared to Policy 1 that only considers the con- ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
tacts with confirmed infected people, Policy 2 also
takes contacts with untested (but probable to be This work was supported in part by NSF grants CNS-
infected) people into account, and hence it has a 1618520 and CNS-2028547.
better performance. This is clearly demonstrated
in its superior performance in all of the three ex- REFERENCES
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6. CONCLUSION
[6] CDC. How to protect yourself & others. https:
In this paper, we have provided a detailed blueprint on //www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/preven
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98 © International Telecommunication Union, 2020