Fast Company's report on MIT plan
https://www.fastcompany.com/90488140/mit-has-an-ambitious-plan-to-detect-if-youve-been-exposed-to-the-coronavirus
Encryption pioneer honored for his work
https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/rivest_1403005.cfm
A computerized contact tracing system advocated by a team led by an encryption pioneer may help authorities ease social-distancing guidelines by tending to quickly isolate the contacts of infected persons, thus halting spread of the disease.
From Fast Company
Instead of relying on GPS-based location data extracted from millions of people’s cellphones, MIT researchers have built a system that uses random identifiers transmitted via Bluetooth—the same technology that you use to connect your smartphone to your headphones. Bluetooth signals also have another benefit: They’re just more accurate than GPS, which often doesn’t function inside buildings.
“Instead of an eye in the sky that watches everybody, we want to have the phones that people are carrying around tell how close they’ve been to other people,” says Ronald L. Rivest, a professor at MIT Institute and the project’s principal investigator.
Rivest’s team has designed a system, called Private Automated Contact Tracing (PACT), where your phone would constantly emit a random string of numbers, like an anonymous ID, via Bluetooth signal. Your phone would also keep a running list of any Bluetooth signals and their associated numbers that it detects within a certain set of parameters—such as within 6 or 7 feet, for a duration of 10 minutes or more.
When people test positive for the virus, a public health official would give them a QR code to scan in the app, which would trigger the upload of their entire Bluetooth ID log to the cloud. Then, anyone who has the app on their phone would receive a notification if they happened to be in close contact with the infected person—which could encourage them to enter into self-quarantine.
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