CovidSens: A Vision on Reliable Social Sensing based Risk Alerting Systems for COVID-19 Spread
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With the spiraling pandemic of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), it has becoming inherently important to disseminate accurate and timely information about the disease. Due to the ubiquity of Internet connectivity and smart devices, social sensing is emerging as a dynamic sensing paradigm to collect real-time observations from online users. In this vision paper we propose CovidSens, the concept of social-sensing-based risk alerting systems to notify the general public about the COVID-19 spread. The CovidSens concept is motivated by two recent observations: 1) people have been actively sharing their state of health and experience of the COVID-19 via online social media, and 2) official warning channels and news agencies are relatively slower than people reporting their observations and experiences about COVID-19 on social media. We anticipate an unprecedented opportunity to leverage the posts generated by the social media users to build a real-time analytic system for gathering and circulating vital information of the COVID-19 propagation. Specifically, the vision of CovidSens attempts to answer the questions of: how to track the spread of the COVID-19? How to distill reliable information about the disease with the coexistence of prevailing rumors and misinformation in the social media? How to inform the general public about the latest state of the spread timely and effectively and alert them to remain prepared? In this vision paper, we discuss the roles of CovidSens and identify the potential challenges in implementing reliable social-sensing-based risk alerting systems. We envision that approaches originating from multiple disciplines (e.g. estimation theory, machine learning, constrained optimization) can be effective in addressing the challenges. Finally, we outline a few research directions for future work in CovidSens.
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