Addressing Risks of Lead in Water and Soil: Using Citizen Science and a Unique Partnership with Faith Organizations

One of the most widespread environmental health hazards in the United States remains exposure to the harmful neurotoxin lead. So much lead remains in the urban environment that it is not unusual to find neighborhoods where more than 10% of children exhibit harmful levels of lead, compared to the national average of about 1%. To overcome this challenge, a partnership between IUPUI researchers and faith organizations in Indianapolis is taking aim at the risk of household lead contamination by providing residents the tools they need to protect against it. The community-driven science aspect of this project is intentional—not only will the individuals who participate benefit directly, but the resulting data will also play a role in keeping communities safer more broadly

PvP: Profiling Versus Player! Exploiting Gaming Data for Player Recognition

Video games Industry generated 150$ billion (approx. two times Facebook revenue) and involved one-third of the world population, in 2019 only. It is not hard to imagine how this attracted cyber-criminals, e.g.: 77 million PlayStation Network accounts were compromised in 2011; in 2015 Steam reported more than 70 thousand victims of scam monthly; cyberbullism events are also frequently reported. Being able to recognize gamers leveraging their gaming data could help to mitigate these issues, e.g., harmful players that are banned could be found again in all the other profiles they own. On the other side, this capability could be a further tool in the hand of cyber-criminals. In this paper, we are the first to demonstrate that players can be recognized based on their play-style. In particular, we observe the play-style through gaming data and use a Deep Neural Network for recognition. Our solution addresses games in which players control a character, and generic features are used to make our system possibly applicable to other games as well. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, we run a thorough set of experiments based on players of Dota\ua02, which counts more than 10 million monthly active users. Our results show the efficiency and feasibility of the proposal, achieving 96% accuracy with only two minutes of gaming data

Barriers to Homeless Persons Acquiring Health Insurance Through the Affordable Care Act

BackgroundMedicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is intended to provide a framework for increasing health care access for vulnerable populations, including the 1.2 million who experience homelessness each year in the United States.ObjectiveWe sought to characterize homeless persons' knowledge of the ACA, identify barriers to their ACA enrollment, and determine access to various forms of communication that could be used to facilitate enrollment.MethodsAt an urban county Level I trauma center, we interviewed all noncritically ill adults who presented to the emergency department (ED) during daytime hours and were able to provide consent. We assessed access to communication, awareness of the ACA, insurance status, and barriers preventing subjects from enrolling in health insurance and compared homeless persons' responses with concomitantly enrolled housed individuals.ResultsOf the 650 enrolled subjects, 134 (20.2%) were homeless. Homeless subjects were more likely to have never heard of the ACA (26% vs. 10%). "Not being aware if they qualify for Medicaid" was the most common (70%) and most significant (30%) barrier to enrollment reported by uninsured homeless persons. Of homeless subjects who were unsure if they qualified for Medicaid, 91% reported an income < 138% of the federal poverty level, likely qualifying them for enrollment. Although 99% of housed subjects reported access to either phone or internet, only 74% of homeless subjects reported access.ConclusionsHomeless persons report having less knowledge of the ACA than their housed counterparts, poor understanding of ACA qualification criteria, and limited access to phone and internet. ED-based outreach and education regarding ACA eligibility may increase their enrollment