259,896 research outputs found

    Digital Contact Tracing: The Medium is the Message

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    This essay investigates digital media devices and networks for addressing the spread and control of the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 infection. But unlike many of the other essays in this special issue, it will not focus on the message — the information and misinformation, the accurate reportageand the rumors, or the news and the fake-news— that is conveyed onthese digital platforms. Instead, I will focus on the use of digital mobile devices and networks to monitor and control the social aspectsof the virus and the vectors of infection. Toward this end, we will considerthe different ways that mobile technology can be employed to address and respond to a global pandemic like COVID-19; and we will examine the opportunities and challenges of DCTT in an effort not just to understand how these technologies work but to extract from this analysis a clear formulation of their possible benefits and attendant costs

    Non-cooperative Feedback Rate Control Game for Channel State Information in Wireless Networks

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    It has been well recognized that channel state information (CSI) feedback is of great importance for dowlink transmissions of closed-loop wireless networks. However, the existing work typically researched the CSI feedback problem for each individual mobile station (MS), and thus, cannot efficiently model the interactions among self-interested mobile users in the network level. To this end, in this paper, we propose an alternative approach to investigate the CSI feedback rate control problem in the analytical setting of a game theoretic framework, in which a multiple-antenna base station (BS) communicates with a number of co-channel MSs through linear precoder. Specifically, we first present a non-cooperative feedback-rate control game (NFC), in which each MS selects the feedback rate to maximize its performance in a distributed way. To improve efficiency from a social optimum point of view, we then introduce pricing, called the non-cooperative feedback-rate control game with price (NFCP). The game utility is defined as the performance gain by CSI feedback minus the price as a linear function of the CSI feedback rate. The existence of the Nash equilibrium of such games is investigated, and two types of feedback protocols (FDMA and CSMA) are studied. Simulation results show that by adjusting the pricing factor, the distributed NFCP game results in close optimal performance compared with that of the centralized scheme.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures; IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, special issue on Game Theory in Wireless Communications, 201

    Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

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    This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide
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