Human Mobility Trends during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

In March of this year, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and it continues to threaten public health. This global health crisis imposes limitations on daily movements, which have deteriorated every sector in our society. Understanding public reactions to the virus and the non-pharmaceutical interventions should be of great help to fight COVID-19 in a strategic way. We aim to provide tangible evidence of the human mobility trends by comparing the day-by-day variations across the U.S. Large-scale public mobility at an aggregated level is observed by leveraging mobile device location data and the measures related to social distancing. Our study captures spatial and temporal heterogeneity as well as the sociodemographic variations regarding the pandemic propagation and the non-pharmaceutical interventions. All mobility metrics adapted capture decreased public movements after the national emergency declaration. The population staying home has increased in all states and becomes more stable after the stay-at-home order with a smaller range of fluctuation. There exists overall mobility heterogeneity between the income or population density groups. The public had been taking active responses, voluntarily staying home more, to the in-state confirmed cases while the stay-at-home orders stabilize the variations. The study suggests that the public mobility trends conform with the government message urging to stay home. We anticipate our data-driven analysis offers integrated perspectives and serves as evidence to raise public awareness and, consequently, reinforce the importance of social distancing while assisting policymakers.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

Economic Model for Vehicle Ownership Quota Policies and Applications in China

AbstractTraffic congestion has caused huge economic loss and environmental pollution every year. As a demand management policy to reduce congestion, vehicle ownership quota system that directly controls the number of vehicles on the road has recently been adopted in some metropolitan areas including Beijing and Shanghai. When it comes to implementation of quota system, Beijing uses the plate lottery system, so that everyone interested in owning a vehicle can participate and there's no monetary transaction in the process. Shanghai, on the other hand, uses the plate auction system and participants bid for the limited number of vehicle plates available. This paper aims at building a theoretical model that quantitatively analyzes the benefits of such policies. This study extends the joint decision model of vehicle ownership and mileage model, and applied compensating variation method to measure the net social impact change of the different quota systems. Under this proposed framework, a numerical demonstration is conducted

Detecting entanglement by pure bosonic extension

Detecting and quantifying quantum entanglement is a central task in quantum information theory. Relative entropy of entanglement (REE) is one of the most famous quantities for measuring entanglement and has various applications in many other fields. One well-studied and efficient approach for calculating the lower bound of REE is the positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion. But it fails in the bound entangled area. In this work, we use a method called pure bosonic extension to significantly improve the feasibility of $k$-symmetric/bosonic extensions which characterize the separable set from outside by a hierarchy structure. Based on this method, we can efficiently approximate the boundaries of $k$-bosonic extendible sets and obtain the desired lower bound of REE. Compared to the Semi-Definite Programming method, for example, the symmetric extension function in QETLAB, our algorithm can support much larger single particle dimensions and much larger $k$.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

GNNHLS: Evaluating Graph Neural Network Inference via High-Level Synthesis

With the ever-growing popularity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), efficient GNN inference is gaining tremendous attention. Field-Programming Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a promising execution platform due to their fine-grained parallelism, low-power consumption, reconfigurability, and concurrent execution. Even better, High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools bridge the gap between the non-trivial FPGA development efforts and rapid emergence of new GNN models. In this paper, we propose GNNHLS, an open-source framework to comprehensively evaluate GNN inference acceleration on FPGAs via HLS, containing a software stack for data generation and baseline deployment, and FPGA implementations of 6 well-tuned GNN HLS kernels. We evaluate GNNHLS on 4 graph datasets with distinct topologies and scales. The results show that GNNHLS achieves up to 50.8x speedup and 423x energy reduction relative to the CPU baselines. Compared with the GPU baselines, GNNHLS achieves up to 5.16x speedup and 74.5x energy reduction