Modelling and controlling infectious diseases

The financial support by IDRC has made it much easier to put together network activities involving scientists in both countries, a special example is the large presence of the Chinese students in the 2012 Summer School on Mathematics for Public Health the Canadian group organized in Edmonton in May of 2012.Infectious disease control is a major challenge in China due to China’s fast growing economy, changing social networks and evolving health service infrastructures. The success of disease control in China has a profound impact beyond its borders. In support of better disease control, this five year research program was designed to enhance China’s national capacity for analyzing, modeling and predicting transmission dynamics of infectious diseases through joint research, training young scientists, and building collaborative relationships. This successful program was led by the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention (Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, China) and the Centre for Disease Modeling (York University, Canada), and involved a number of Canadian and Chinese universities in various areas of infectious disease modelling and control. The bilateral collaboration also trained numerous highly qualified personnel and built a network for sustaining collaboration. This capacity building was facilitated by joint projects and bilateral annual meetings in major cities in China and Canada. The research activities on modeling major public health threats of infectious diseases focused on major diseases in China and/or issues of global public health concern including HIV transmission and prevention among high risk population, HIV treatment and drug resistance, influenza, schistosomiasis, mutation and stemma of SIV and HIV, latent and active tuberculosis infection, HBV control and vaccination. The outputs of the project were reported through peer-reviewed publications and modelling– based and science-informed public policy recommendations

Robust and cheating-resilient power auctioning on Resource Constrained Smart Micro-Grids

The principle of Continuous Double Auctioning (CDA) is known to provide an efficient way of matching supply and demand among distributed selfish participants with limited information. However, the literature indicates that the classic CDA algorithms developed for grid-like applications are centralised and insensitive to the processing resources capacity, which poses a hindrance for their application on resource constrained, smart micro-grids (RCSMG). A RCSMG loosely describes a micro-grid with distributed generators and demand controlled by selfish participants with limited information, power storage capacity and low literacy, communicate over an unreliable infrastructure burdened by limited bandwidth and low computational power of devices. In this thesis, we design and evaluate a CDA algorithm for power allocation in a RCSMG. Specifically, we offer the following contributions towards power auctioning on RCSMGs. First, we extend the original CDA scheme to enable decentralised auctioning. We do this by integrating a token-based, mutual-exclusion (MUTEX) distributive primitive, that ensures the CDA operates at a reasonably efficient time and message complexity of O(N) and O(logN) respectively, per critical section invocation (auction market execution). Our CDA algorithm scales better and avoids the single point of failure problem associated with centralised CDAs (which could be used to adversarially provoke a break-down of the grid marketing mechanism). In addition, the decentralised approach in our algorithm can help eliminate privacy and security concerns associated with centralised CDAs. Second, to handle CDA performance issues due to malfunctioning devices on an unreliable network (such as a lossy network), we extend our proposed CDA scheme to ensure robustness to failure. Using node redundancy, we modify the MUTEX protocol supporting our CDA algorithm to handle fail-stop and some Byzantine type faults of sites. This yields a time complexity of O(N), where N is number of cluster-head nodes; and message complexity of O((logN)+W) time, where W is the number of check-pointing messages. These results indicate that it is possible to add fault tolerance to a decentralised CDA, which guarantees continued participation in the auction while retaining reasonable performance overheads. In addition, we propose a decentralised consumption scheduling scheme that complements the auctioning scheme in guaranteeing successful power allocation within the RCSMG. Third, since grid participants are self-interested we must consider the issue of power theft that is provoked when participants cheat. We propose threat models centred on cheating attacks aimed at foiling the extended CDA scheme. More specifically, we focus on the Victim Strategy Downgrade; Collusion by Dynamic Strategy Change, Profiling with Market Prediction; and Strategy Manipulation cheating attacks, which are carried out by internal adversaries (auction participants). Internal adversaries are participants who want to get more benefits but have no interest in provoking a breakdown of the grid. However, their behaviour is dangerous because it could result in a breakdown of the grid. Fourth, to mitigate these cheating attacks, we propose an exception handling (EH) scheme, where sentinel agents use allocative efficiency and message overheads to detect and mitigate cheating forms. Sentinel agents are tasked to monitor trading agents to detect cheating and reprimand the misbehaving participant. Overall, message complexity expected in light demand is O(nLogN). The detection and resolution algorithm is expected to run in linear time complexity O(M). Overall, the main aim of our study is achieved by designing a resilient and cheating-free CDA algorithm that is scalable and performs well on resource constrained micro-grids. With the growing popularity of the CDA and its resource allocation applications, specifically to low resourced micro-grids, this thesis highlights further avenues for future research. First, we intend to extend the decentralised CDA algorithm to allow for participants’ mobile phones to connect (reconnect) at different shared smart meters. Such mobility should guarantee the desired CDA properties, the reliability and adequate security. Secondly, we seek to develop a simulation of the decentralised CDA based on the formal proofs presented in this thesis. Such a simulation platform can be used for future studies that involve decentralised CDAs. Third, we seek to find an optimal and efficient way in which the decentralised CDA and the scheduling algorithm can be integrated and deployed in a low resourced, smart micro-grid. Such an integration is important for system developers interested in exploiting the benefits of the two schemes while maintaining system efficiency. Forth, we aim to improve on the cheating detection and mitigation mechanism by developing an intrusion tolerance protocol. Such a scheme will allow continued auctioning in the presence of cheating attacks while incurring low performance overheads for applicability in a RCSMG

Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community

The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In this collection, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond traditional classrooms and scholarly journals to share their work with the public. Here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and to archive some of the important public-facing work feminists are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable. “In Public Feminisms, Baker and Dove-Viebahn have curated a vibrantly intersectional collection of essays that speak both to the longstanding commitment of feminisms to education and activism and the urgent need for this work in the contemporary moment. This book shows how scholar-activists are bringing together knowledge production and the sharing of that knowledge and community engagement through a series of compelling case studies. I can’t wait to teach it.” —Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Baumann professor in American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Aviva Dove-Viebahn is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/textbooks/1004/thumbnail.jp

Transforming HIV Prevention & Care for Marginalised Populations: using information & communication technologies (ICTs) in community-based & led approaches

[Extract] Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming community-based and community-led HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people. This book celebrates and shares crucial work of frontline HIV workers, activists, researchers and educators whom are using innovative ICT. The book builds on, and extends the work included in two earlier issues of Digital Culture & Education (DCE), entitled 'Prevention is a solution: Building the HIVe'(Singh and Walsh, 2012) and 'Innovative programmatic approaches to HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender persons using information and communication technology (ICT)'(Adams, Klindera, Walsh and Wolf, 2014). It also includes three additional articles published by the journal

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity

Transforming HIV Prevention & Care for Marginalised Populations: using information & communication technologies (ICTs) in community-based & led approaches

[Extract] Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming community-based and community-led HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people. This book celebrates and shares crucial work of frontline HIV workers, activists, researchers and educators whom are using innovative ICT. The book builds on, and extends the work included in two earlier issues of Digital Culture & Education (DCE), entitled 'Prevention is a solution: Building the HIVe'(Singh and Walsh, 2012) and 'Innovative programmatic approaches to HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender persons using information and communication technology (ICT)'(Adams, Klindera, Walsh and Wolf, 2014). It also includes three additional articles published by the journal

Urban Informatics

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity