Ramesh: Hello Everyone, and welcome to our session on,
How Can We Use Digital Solutions For COVID-19?
Especially solutions that can be used by the governments,
and by public health authorities.
In the first part, I'm going to talk about COVID Safe Path,
a technology that goes beyond proximity or contact tracing,
but really a solution to restart the economy
and build resilient societies.
And in the second half, Professor Sandy Pentland
is going to talk about another range of digital solutions
for managing the reboot from the COVID challenge.
I'm Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at MIT Media Lab.
You may be familiar with the idea of contact tracing.
In this case, a patient 31 in Korea,
a woman who went to hospital not because she was sick,
but because she had a car accident.
And after that she went to the lunch and church,
and along the way ended up impacting more than 1000 people.
And then authorities in Korea had to interview
these more than thousand people to back trace
and see if any of them are showing symptoms
to prevent further spread.
Now, this is very challenging to achieve
as the number of cases increase,
and if you try to use a digital solution
to create this social graph, then it can lead
to a Big Brother surveillance state.
So how can we achieve this while maintaining privacy?
Just to be sure, digital contact tracing,
the one we're talking about today with solutions
like Safe Paths and Safe Places will notify
if a citizen has cross path,
send them an alert and provide some context
of the location and where it has occurred
and what they were doing at that point.
And the idea is to use smartphones
to use colocation technologies, proximity technologies,
such as GPS and Bluetooth and Telecom,
and WiFi access points and so on.
Now, the challenge here is, how do we maintain the utility
of contract tracing and privacy at the same time?
If we take an example of Google Maps
and how we can see traffic, we all willingly
give away our GPS location.
Not much privacy, and Google is able to provide
this fantastic real time traffic map.
We would love to see a real time map
of where the infections are and who's impacting who.
But that's not possible today as we can see
on the bottom right, because health data
is considered private we cannot crowdsource it
and start providing predictions
like we can predictions for car traffic.
So the goal here really, is to make sure that
we can achieve both at the same time, privacy and utility.
And that's COVID Safe Paths.
And privacy just doesn't mean privacy of an individual,
but it could be because of consent challenges,
it could be regulations in those jurisdictions,
it could also be trade secrets between hospitals
and government insurance and pharmacies and so on.
Sometimes it's about national secret.
You don't want to reveal the social graph of a country,
and also what's incentive for individuals
if they're already healthy to participate in such a system.
And you will also say, GPS seems
like such a low stakes information,
why not just keep it away?
The problem is, even if you anonymize an aggregate that,
it's not necessarily private
and can lead to re-identification.
A good example is Strava,
which many of us use for outdoor activities.
When they released the heat map,
it ended up revealing the four power bases of the US Army,
Nigeria and India, because only Westerners use Strava
and they nicely outlined these bases.
And what about Bluetooth?
Bluetooth has bigger a problem, because unless GPS
that's simply displaying the signals on the phone,
a Bluetooth best proximity actually involves
a phone emitting a Bluetooth signal.
Is a signal that I'm here, I'm here, I'm here,
and it can easily be nuked by widespread third party apps.
So we don't have to be really thinking about carefully,
if you use technologies like GPS
and Bluetooth for privacy acts.
So what COVID Safe Paths application does,
is in the first version it simply logs,
your personal diary, logs information into your diary,
and just simply compared with downloaded
public infection cases, this data, the privacy here.
In version two, the expectation is that
public health authorities will release some information,
redacted, anonymized and aggregated information
about the location and Bluetooths of infected people.
And those diaries can be downloaded
on a healthy user's phone
and compare them to see if it will overlap.
If the infected person was at Starbucks
at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, and a grocery store
on Wednesday at 8:00 p.m.
and at a wedding on Saturday at 3:00 p.m.,
they would figure out if you were
in the same place at the same time.
And version three, we would like to reduce the burden
on (mumbles) by using additional tools
that would involve self reporting, authentication,
and traditional methods to achieve such privacy.
So you can (mumbles) readily available
it's the Beta Mode, actively conducting pilots,
with many public health officials.
So the solution is really geared towards
interaction orchestration
between citizens and public health,
which is different from other approaches
where it is purely aimed at at citizens
but may or may not help the public health.
It's also the world's largest open source project
for contact tracing and solutions
for public health on GitHub.
The other tool for public health
is we call it Safe Places, which is a web tool,
looks like a GIS tool that allows the public health tracer
or officials to upload the patient's history
and remove all the personally identifiable data
and then release that in an anonymized,
aggregated and future encrypted manner.
So it simply makes the interview
process extremely efficient.
But there are lots of pieces to this puzzle.
If you want to create a solution,
first of all, we need a proximity tech,
we need to provide tools for the user,
and then we need to provide tools for the public health.
So on the left, the technology layer can have Telecom data,
GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and others.
But the users need much more than the fact
that whether they cross paths or not.
They're gonna get personal guidance based on their,
individual situation, their their age group,
who's at home, kinda take care of other people in the house.
They want symptom checker, they want to verify
they're maintaining the 14 day quarantine,
they wanna get immunity passports
after they're out of quarantine
after they had done psychological tests,
and the (mumbles) an incentive (mumbles).
For public health officials on the other hand,
a very different goal.
They want the ability to call an infected
or exposed person and have a conversation with them,
because public health is not something
you can just deliver through an alert.
Also needs to know what the hotspots are,
the (mumbles) spread, can they start analyzing how many beds
and other sources they have.
They also need to coordinate the at home population
if the individuals who are in quarantine
or recently have taken a test,
but they're waiting for the test,
the individual sooner to get food delivered or
medicines delivered.
And the biggest challenges for public health
is to have a very clean workflow
so that they can provide the certification
and test results to the citizens.
The question is how can we achieve all of this
in a completely privacy preserving way
in an automatic manner using digital technology.
Because right now you have to share your phone numbers,
need for (mumbles) order and knock on the door
to see if people are doing the right thing
is very cumbersome, it actually invades privacy.
So with Safe Path (mumbles) achieving
all those using the latest (mumbles) mobile phone technology
as well as computation matters.
And within these you can see the proximity API's
are being provided by different players.
And Bluetooth specifically, is recently being provided
and it's like Apple and Google,
and also the PACT project at MIT
and Pepe from Europe and so on.
Nevertheless, that's important,
but still a very specific component of proximity, take tech,
and also the skills to really tackle the problem of
COVID-19 in a given jurisdiction.
So we are delighted to have
a real growing and and Alliance for safe bots.
So myself and Sandy Pentland,
and Kate Larson and Kevin as world,
leading said MIT but are working also shaped a idea and who,
and HHS and mayo clinic
and we have wonderful mentors
who are legal intellectual domain,
as well as the profit that you launched a party check
that's been led by, by people from nonprofit
and venture capital and large tech companies.
We're also delighted to have Ernst
and Young as our implementation partner.
And they're working through literally thousands
and thousands of their volunteers
at Ernst and Young to individually help
the public health officials in each country,
each state and each city.
So we would love to work with you.
And to understand Yeah.
And the safe plus team has three main verticals.
It has a technology component,
the think tank component and implementation.
On the technology.
Again, we have parts we have the app and the web tool.
We also have world's largest open source code base
that has Ulema GS,
including the Google API's,
as well as a lot of times,
and they're also building an interoperable backbone
so that any app in any country can be interoperable.
On the think tank,
we are working on standards
Privacy guidelines,
landscape analysis and various publications.
And as far as implementations are concerned, as I mentioned,
we have engagement with 30 jurisdictions already,
we have material for training and monitoring
for health officials with diseases.
We have a venture capital startup group
that's helping others to build scalable vertical solutions
on top of this backbone,
and also an arm that maintains corporate relationships.
So if you're interested in either providing your services
as part of this alliance,
or your corporate who wants to use these solutions,
we have a lot of resources available for you.
Now, if you're a public health officials,
this is what we often talk about.
It doesn't matter which solution you use,
but these are some of the criterias
that are worth considering.
First of all, any solution that's being considered,
should be privacy first,
because it's not privacy First,
the adoption across the population,
especially the vulnerable you know,
ethnic minorities, people.
Hold on, who are worried about persecution,
and so on, will not adopt a solution
if it doesn't provide some notion of privacy.
Second, it should be open source
so that you're not locked into some kind of a walled garden.
And we have to continue to buy the solutions
from that particular vendor as the time goes on.
So it has to be open source.
Third, it has to be interoperable,
so that an individual
if the cloud from one country to another country
or one state to another state
disruptions are still interoperable,
important that multiple languages supported
in the same particular jurisdiction.
Safe box is supported in about 25 languages already.
And we also need an ability
for a solution to support non smartphone users even
if they use a feature phone,
or a landline phone.
The solution should work
and safe buts achieves that through various mechanisms.
It should help the public health
not just the citizens 72 dashboards hotspots
and spread analysis.
And finally, you should have the modularity
and use save the public health officials
are already using an E system
or logging system or alert system,
then these modules can fit in there easily as well.
It's not something that's standalone,
and replaces what's what's going on.
And these are considerations
for us in building solutions with safe paths
and safe as well.
Now many interesting questions about
how's this all going to work
with the Google Apple proximity solutions
that have been announced?
So as I mentioned earlier,
this is providing a proximity API for Bluetooth.
But in reality,
we need so much more to actually solve the problem.
So to be sure,
what this proximity API does is first exchange keys
by whispering locally or Bluetooth channels.
The infected person will upload the keys to the server
and all the Healthy People Download disinfected keys
and see if there's a match from the keys
that heard during the whispering overdo it.
Of course, there are many more details.
We're happy to help you.
We have a lot of expertise.
I myself have run a lot of groups,
a lot of projects that involve bluetooth for property API's.
So this is a wonderful nose.
And it just makes the job
for safe paths and others to implement API's.
Nevertheless, again,
it's a very specific piece of the puzzle.
We need other technologies to compute activity,
many other technologies to build contract racing,
I made a whole range of other solutions
to help the public health.
And of course, as you see our roadmaps,
you'll see how this proximity API's will be available
as part of safe plus as well.
And another question
that comes up is about GPS versus Bluetooth.
And we can take this up during the Q&A in detail,
but maybe the most,
the first challenge with Bluetooth is
that it requires very large adoption in a country
like Singapore that's using a Bluetooth solution.
percent adoption
with a score of 12% is only one point 44 per percent,
less than just over a percent of all the encounters
will be registered
if their adoption is so this is not a problem with GPS,
because it scales linearly.
If 12% of using the safe bots GPS solution,
then 12% of hotspots can be identified.
So, that's the beauty of using.
Of course, we do encourage you to use all
the four modalities,
Telecom, GPS, Bluetooth,
Wi Fi, to compute this,
but just want to make sure
that Bluetooth alone does not solve it.
Isn't false negatives from any one of these technologies
is also a very big problem.
We should never claim knology has very low false positives,
false negatives, we could
that could lead to unnecessary alerts.
And you know, the situation with Amber alerts
for example, is that in studies show that in most cases,
people just ignore it,
because the very annoying audit
where they're very widespread,
and they're not very specific to what individuals can.
And the next point is to solve the public health issue.
It's not just about proximity.
It's, but it's also about tracing,
which is the ability to understand the context,
where it was happening,
and how it was happening.
So for example, if you give an alert
that you bought to someone,
but you don't tell them
whether it happened in a grocery store or in a coffee shop,
is within the grocery store,
you're wearing a mask and maintaining social distance.
We're in a coffee shop, maybe it was crowded,
and you're not wearing a mask and maybe even shook hands.
So the individual what the context is behind
that alert so they can they can believe
the seriousness of this of this alert.
And again, for tracing we need more
than just ability to alert but we need to see heat maps
and the spread analysis will be on tracing,
Winning Solutions for quarantine
and health verification and immunity passport.
And the main problem we are solving at stake was that
you have this in a completely privacy preserving manner.
So even if you don't know the phone number,
or even if you don't have the address of the exposed person,
how can you achieve this,
in a way that doesn't invade.
It's not invasive to the privacy.
And the US has just released its guidance to reopen
the economy. It has three parts testing and tracing,
healthcare capacity and other plans.
And as you will see,
the testing and tracing is actually a very important part of
how we're going to start.
So to conclude, we need abilities to digital abilities
to choreograph the whole society by the government.
But if you do that it will lead to a big brother
and surveillance state.
So we need to create private tools
that the coordination happens amongst the communities.
And there's a very great synergy
between the public health efforts
and what the citizens can do.
Since the beginning solutions like
this will solve the public health issue of the epidemic.
Very soon, they will start helping us in restarting
the economy. In the long run,
we believe that we should use such digital tools
to build resilient societies. Thank you, you there
Sandy: Okay,
so my name is Alex Pentland, people call me Sandy.
I'm going to talk about other parts of the system
that we need to build out particularly,
to manage things and the policy that we do,
and to restart the economy.
And just as a bit of background,
my background is how does Big Data interact with society?
Back in the middle of the 2000s,
I started the discussion at Davos
that ended up being GDPR in Europe.
And I'm still involved in
that I'm on the board
of the UN sustainable development data,
which is how do you measure all of these properties
and I work with the EU on trying to get a framework
for data handling that is both secure and private,
and robust and scalable.
References to that at the bottom.
And I guess we'll share some of the slides at the end here.
So as Ramesh was saying,
one of the key things is
how do we avoid Big Brother solutions?
In the past, historically,
it wasn't as much of a problem, guys.
Secure and private, robust and scalable.
And 30 some minutes to that minutes.
We'll share some of the slides at the end here.
Can you guys hear me all okay, I can't
tell where the thing is. Any rate?
Okay, well, the audio seems a little weird.
Okay. Let's hope that that stops happening.
How do we can avoid Big Brother solutions.
The key here is is not to concentrate data in one spot.
So we as humans think about getting
all the information together,
and then doing analytics.
But the moment you do that in a honeypot for bad guys,
you have people coming in and misusing the data.
Or you don't have copies of data where you didn't before.
And the solution that we promote
and are getting real traction
with is what we call open algorithms,
where you set up a question answering layer.
So data is held locally,
for instance, in hospitals.
And it doesn't move.
But they were answering questions
to be able to do public health
or to be able to do the sort of tracing
that Ramesh was talking about.
And so from a computational point of view,
the data lives in one spot.
It has a ledger, which I'm saying is a blockchain here,
but it can be any sort of ledger to record what happens.
People present questions or ideas.
The permissions computation runs locally.
So you're not sharing data.
And what you get out of that,
then are these safe aggregated answers.
And this is in use in national scale Estonia first,
Eurostat has adopted this
for their official statistics framework.
And let me just show you some of the things you can do.
Oh, well, mesh talked about Strava
that released aggregate anonymous data,
but it was actually very fine grain data.
And it was linked together so that you can see pads.
And those are two things that you can't do.
We now know a lot about what you have to do
to ensure safety.
And that sort of canonical thing is to use what
the census studies do the census agencies do.
So you can release aggregate statistics
and Census blocks.
But those can only be linked to one other census block.
You can't have pads or chains.
So you can say that people in this neighborhood work in
that neighborhood,
that people in this neighborhood shop in that neighborhood,
but you can't do further linkage.
And when you do that,
it's extremely difficult to re identify people.
And you can prevent that with some standard ways,
like distribution, clipping, differential privacy.
The things you can now do are pretty impressive.
So for us as we did a study
of social distancing in New York,
and we're doing Policy Studies in the Boston area,
also in Australia and Mexico and elsewhere.
This particular study is led by Esteban Morrow,
there's a URL and it shows the results
of policy in the New York area.
So this is something where what we did is
We were able to estimate the number of social contacts
for people in each neighborhood.
So if you live in a neighborhood,
how many social contacts do you have in a day,
and those are defined as being proximate to each other,
not Bluetooth GPS. And what we saw is
before all this happened,
the average person had about 75 contacts during the day.
And as the policies came in to act,
we saw that decrease down to five, so 93% reduction,
and that's a huge reduction,
exactly the sort of thing we need.
Now, there's been some question,
Is this work the same
for rich people as for poor people?
And the answer is, yes, everybody is sheltering.
Rich people used to get out around a lot more
so they had a lot more contacts.
And it's known
that the number of contacts is very tightly correlated
with the amount of money you make poorer parts of society
have very less contacts.
But they've all gotten to about the same level.
So the foreign parts of society have had to reduce less,
richer parts more, but everybody's getting there.
So that's, that's good news.
And using these sort of methods,
we can now monitor what's happening.
So for instance, we can ask not only
how much are people sheltering in place,
but where are the places that they go.
And so you can look at different points
that they might have gone.
You don't know exactly who did there.
But you can say, how many people from
what different neighborhoods go to what sorts of stores
so people from local neighborhoods
tend to go to local stores.
So elementary schools,
which you see in the top, left,
there are not very mixing sorts of places.
Relationships, the infections stay in the neighborhood,
whereas certain sorts of restaurants
are extremely highly mixed across neighborhoods.
So they're the long links that cause infection
to transfer broadly and quickly.
And of course, what we've done is we first got rid
of big groups like soccer matches,
and so forth. And then we shut down restaurants
and other sort of public destinations.
And finally, we've set down a lot of office
for working from home.
And that's not as important as the first two categories,
but it's easier because we can do a lot of things remotely
when you're talking about offices,
factories in work.
Warehouses are less easy to shut down,
but they're also less mixed in terms
of transmitting disease long distances,
which is good news.
So What's left?
Well, in New York the big thing
that's left are grocery stores.
That's the place
that you get mixing across different neighborhoods.
And in the arc, it's a real problem,
because the grocery stores are very small.
They're very cramped.
And people don't have big refrigerators.
So they have to go out every day.
And we find that a huge fraction of the continuing
infections in New York,
happen through grocery stores.
So these are the sorts of things that you can get
as real time insights for policy makers,
and for individuals to be able to modulate their behavior.
Going forward, we're going to have to re booth the economy.
So knowing what's safe,
what to open first is of course important,
but also knowing who to be doing what job
we have an enormous number of people out of work.
A lot of the people that out of work,
have had the disease or have antibodies,
and you see the rolling out of these antibody tests.
Now on large scale,
there's a little bit of disorganization,
some of them don't work so well,
but some of them do.
And they have a huge advantage
because with many people beginning to acquire immunity,
and of course, as we get vaccines will be a lot more.
Most of the people that are out of work or younger,
lower wage, minorities more likely to have lost their jobs.
So those are exactly the people
you want to get back to work most.
And they're also the people
that are more likely to have immunity.
So that raises the idea of immunity certification
in Britain, they call it health passports.
And this is not a new idea.
We used to have this for tuberculosis.
So food handlers had to certify test
that they didn't have tuberculosis
before they would be hired to work
with food up today to work with kids in schools,
you have to show that you've had certain immunizations.
So this is not a new idea in society.
But what's different now is that we're far more digital
than we ever were before.
So instead of having just the local hospital
or the local government,
give out paper certificates,
we're talking about creating these national databases.
And that's dangerous.
The moment you create a national thing,
it can be subverted in various ways.
It can be hacked in various ways.
So the techniques I talked about earlier,
where the data is held by the hospitals
or by the local authorities
and only released
with particular permissions to certify people
is trying to duplicate the process of having paper
that's issued locally.
So this. It can't be abused broadly,
there's no large honey pots.
And hopefully what this lets people do
is begin creating stores,
other sorts of things where the people
that are customer facing and are higher risk are immune,
and the people in the back room are not actively infected,
and don't have to be immune
because they're less at risk.
But that's the vision for these things
and the sort of techniques that we're building.
We're working with many different countries to do this.
Many different international organizations,
we'd be happy to work with you to help.
An example of how this works more creatively
is in the finance area.
Where we have today when you buy something on a credit card,
or with your phone that provides a request
by a certified requester you
goes through a network like MasterCard,
goes to your bank,
who then says yes,
this person has the money to do that.
And that provides the answer back to the merchant.
And what we're talking about here
is doing the same thing with hospitals.
Having a network
that routes your request to certify yourself
as immune to your hospital where you've taken the test.
And that provides a map to the person
that you've decided to give your immunity certificate to.
So that's the type of systems that we're talking about.
In a much longer term,
there's a really wicked problem.
And that is that it's social connections that create value.
On the left hand You see,
the more dense a neighborhood is,
the more interactions there are,
the greater the creation of GDP,
of innovation, and so forth.
At the same time.
The graph on the right shows the greater the density,
the interaction,
(laughs)
the more the spread of disease,
they're the same.
And so we have a problem
of if we're going to maintain the innovation rate
in our society, while minimizing the infection rate,
we're going to have to change the way things work.
We're going to have to,
instead of everybody going to the center city,
or a central place to do something,
we're going to have to move to
a more distributed organization,
so that if an infection breaks out,
you can quarantine it locally.
And yet, we need to maintain high rate of interaction
between these local entities.
And this is actually an old idea.
It's called satellite cities.
And the idea there is you move
manufacturing distribution offices to residential areas
instead of having them in a central location.
The central satellite cities are specialized
One does distribution
one does certain sorts of manufacturing,
other does R&D.
And you want to make sure
that they're redundant
so that if an infection breaks out in one,
you still have capacity in the other.
And that leaves the central city,
mostly for headquarters and entertainment.
So instead of you working from home one day a week
you work from in your neighborhood,
or from home four days a week,
and maybe only one day a week,
you go into the center city,
you can take this idea of modularization of functions
and making it redundant or breaking up the connectivity
in the graph, so that you still get connections,
short connections between people,
but they're not very frequent.
And you get the ability to block things off
if need be because they're geographically located.
And concentrated is the sort of organization
that we see going forward.
A lot of this is already happening.
We see things like we work,
just they did it a little wrong.
They were too early.
And they were in central cities
rather than in neighborhoods.
But that type of idea, actually to work.
So my name is Alex peddlin, peddlin@mit.edu.
Send me an email if you're interested. Thank you.
Go back.
Ramesh: Excellent.
Thank you, Sandy. This is great.
So let's look at some of the questions.
Maybe I'll start with a few.
And as more come in for you.
Sandy: No, I don't want to.
Ramesh: Yes.
Sandy: You want to start Ramesh.
Ramesh: I can start or you can start Sandy short.
Sandy: So I have a question
Will the resulting anonymized data be made
available to researchers
and the policy that we have
as a researcher and station is to make that data open.
And when we work
with different governments around the world,
we strongly advocate
that a lot of this data be made open
because you can use it
for transportation problem planning,
you can use it for development.
You can use it for all sorts of reasons.
And because it doesn't threaten individual privacy,
it can actually just be put on the web.
But why census data is today?
But yes, we the data
that we use is available to researchers under
sort of the normal sort of conditions,
and we make open as much as we can.
For Ramesh.
Ramesh: Yeah, sure. So let me take a few questions.
The two related questions about
the GPS aggregation take place,
are there some solution around it?
And if you start getting that information to government
or public health,
doesn't that lead to some kind of state surveillance?
So let me explain that a little bit.
So first of all, when we use GPS data,
the affected person works
with government officials to create deducted trails,
if you know you can scrub their home location,
scrub the workplace,
they know their workplace.
And if they're brought on Main Street,
we can scrub that because they're in their own vehicle.
And anything else they want to eliminate from the trail.
And then all the remaining spots,
maybe the grocery store,
the wedding they went to,
they went to a mall to buy a particular product,
things like that be left as hotspots with timestamps,
so 2pm at the grocery store 5pm on Saturday at the wedding,
and that that's the only information
that gets that gets relieved,
released in the public domain.
But the healthy individuals never ever,
ever have to GPOs.
Okay, vicious, infected person that goes in the database.
And that's after reduction anonymization aggregation
and that gets downloaded to the healthy phone
and all the calculations take place on the phone themselves.
So that's the beauty of using GPS is the same thing.
With Bluetooth as well,
if you have Bluetooth IDs
that you have exchanged through whispering,
they get uploaded in the same exact manner to the database.
After redacting any traces you might have
from your home location or intellect,
none of the remaining cases go up.
And they can be downloaded again
to the healthy person's phone to do a local match.
The second part of this question is,
if you want to provide hotspots and spread analysis,
how will that work?
And this is also a challenge in a lot of systems
that you may have heard
that all the calculations happened on devices.
So how would how would the authorities know
where they are and where the hotspots are?
And so we have very nice monitors based on
differential privacy that you will see in coming days
that actually allows us to this aggregation
in a meaningful way,
and this is very well started problems even for US Census.
And we have gotten that over similar to those techniques
and they will be available to public health.
Official. So it's kind of an interesting combination,
that you have complete privacy for individuals,
but still ability to create aggregate data
without revealing anything about an individual.
(Talking over each other).
Sandy: To add something to that,
so the sorts of data
that I was talking to the simple way to understand
it is that when you have a telephone,
your telephone provider needs to know what cell tower
you need mirror
so that they can connect you.
They also look at the statistics
of how many people from this cell tower goes
to each of the surrounding cell towers.
So as long as there's a reasonable number of people
and 25 people,
and that's the only data you're doing is like,
Okay, how many people are at this cell tower.
And how many of those people are likely to go to
a second cell tower in the next couple hours
or the next hour.
So that's the data we're talking about.
And as long as you don't link that off, more than.
It's virtually impossible.
And you can guarantee
that it's possible by a little bit extra to trace
that to any individual.
That data is already at the cell tower.
And it doesn't really need to go any further than that.
And that's the type of scheme
and the type of thing that actually happens even today.
Ramesh: That's great.
Another question here is what needs to happen
for the state of Massachusetts,
to you safe, but along with an army of contract racing.
So I'll be the first one to say that we should be humble
and not believe that a piece of software
either on phones
or web tools can somehow solve the problem of COVID-19.
We do need an army,
a human army of tracers to actually solve a lot of
these problems
because public health the notion
of privacy in public health is very different
than notion of privacy say in any kind of
an email service or cryptocurrencies and so on.
In public, every person does have to show up at a test site.
or health side to kind of be seen.
So the notion of privacy is slightly different.
So I would say it's a very human problem at the same time.
And and so the best way to work on this is to amplify
and simplify what the human digital contractors
are doing this army of people
that Massachusetts and Rhode Island's
and many states are hiring now.
And confident things we need to hire what 300,000 people
all over the US.
So they need to be functional.
And our job is to make them more efficient.
And and you know, simplify the tasks
and also reduce the time it takes them right
now it takes them about 30 to 40 minutes
to interview one infected person to see
what to do what they should do next.
And for every infected person,
they might have to call 10 200 people depending on
their previous days.
Sandy: That's assuming
(Talking over each other)
(laughs)
Ramesh: That it's true.
(Talking over each other)
If you're going to a shopping mall
and interacted with a sales clerk there,
who helped you put on a tie or something
you don't may not even know their names,
you may not even know which shifts they're on.
Sandy: A general way that the Media Lab thinks about this
and also AI professionals
and so forth is that AI is not actually what you want.
What you want is extended intelligence,
you want to amplify the people
who want to give them tools to remember
you want to give them tools to organize themselves,
but it's at the service of the person.
So all those humans that are doing contact tracing
are the the core of the system,
but you can help people's memory
you can help them organize
and dial correctly so they don't make mistakes.
You can help them enter data so it's more easier
for them to do it.
And all of those are sort of extending
their intelligence rather than replacing human you.
And still with us.
Ramesh: Absolutely. And so and so in that sense,
there is a related question to it,
like what about outside the US.
And so if you're if you're a government entity or if you're
a health professional,
it is very important to have an army
of public health experts who know how to conduct racing,
but as I said earlier,
it's not just about concentration,
but it's all these other things you have to do,
quarantine management,
immunity certification
having people understand their sick leave policies,
or making sure food
and medicines are delivered to somebody
who's self quarantined, and so on.
So it's very important.
As we're working through partners,
in marriage addictions,
it's important to do a practice run right now.
You know, pretend, just to basically a drill,
pretend some of the people in the town are infected,
and do a process to see who has the debt.
And if you do this practice,
run either using safe POS
as a tool are using interviews
or whatever technologies that are out there,
then you will have a process to go through it in case
the number of cases in your town,
your city in your country start growing.
And so once you once you have trained
those humans in the loop,
the human contact rate,
then everything else can come together,
because we have two tools,
even for safe safe plus,
which is for the citizens and the safe places,
which is cool for health professionals
and work with you and you're welcome to launch
into your own safe parts.
That's white label,
if you don't even use the safe parts logo
that's perfectly fine with us.
It's completely open source,
you can take the tools and build them.
And what's more, even more interesting in MIT spirit is
that we're creating a backbone.
So no matter which app you're using,
they will still be interoperable.
So if you travel from Brazil to Mexico to the US,
it won't matter even if you're using a Portuguese app
or a Spanish app, or an English app,
they will all be able to use
(mumbles)
Sandy: Larger scale.
The house systems are equal, they're inefficient.
Most places in the world have a part of the health system
that the United States doesn't have,
which is they have nurses
that go from house to house to house a couple times a year,
to help with births,
be able to interview the family to make sure
they get the right health information.
And over the years,
we've built quite a bit of infrastructure to help
these people so that when they show up,
they know what the issues are,
they know how to help the family.
And that has an enormous effect on the efficiency
of the healthcare system.
And it also has an enormous effect on the sort of
inequities and inequalities you see in Francis this country.
Because you're getting the right data in the human form
of someone visiting you someone from the community,
usually visiting you,
who has the right data
and can help you understand things
and get the care that you need.
One of the local companies,
which is a spin off of my group is called demography,
calm, handles 10% of all the births in the world.
That's an enormous sort of health benefit.
And they're looking to be able to do
the safe path type tracing,
at the same time,
and I think that sort of brings things out
into resource poor parts of the world,
which have some of the biggest problems with this.
Ramesh: Let me talk about digital twin organizations like
demography that Sandy just talked about
and everything else.
So organizations like democracy have really perfected
the ability to work with public health.
And there's another question related to how this all led to,
some of the recent news from Apple and Google.
So I'll show this slide.
Again. Proximity tip borton nevertheless,
a very tiny piece of the puzzle to solve this bigger public,
chocolate and we need a PS from telecom
that Sandy was talking about earlier,
API's on GPS, which is somewhat easier
because you're supported on the phone.
APS are Bluetooth,
that fortune and Google are working together
and use their own servers,
as well as Wi Fi that we're using.
But we are solving other all the other issues
to actually do that.
And it will not be a good idea for a company,
even if it's a benevolent company like Apple or Google,
to start to own this whole ecosystem,
because that's going to stifle innovation.
It's going to be make it difficult for
for different countries
and different regions to create solutions that are,
customizable, or solutions that require different levels
of privacy and ethics and inclusivity.
And at the same time,
the trust in a big companies could erode.
On the other hand,
I don't think Apple and Google have made it very clear,
that announcements
that they don't want to be the app business.
They want to create the API's but not build
the apps themselves,
which makes complete sense because over time.
Apple and Google also have indicated that
they would like all the data sets to be decentralized,
and only the public health entities should release the app
that uses those API's.
And the goal for safe paths is to indeed work
with you public health entities
and government entities to launch solutions,
either apps or tools that are
for your own communities.
And you can label them any way you want.
You can white label them,
you can use your own logos,
you can use your own language,
you can use your own your contact numbers,
you can use user localize it,
give the data within your own boundaries,
and and all those things using
this open source safe bus software.
So I hope that makes it clear
that the Google Apple announcement is a great announcement.
It's such a great boost for open source platforms like this.
Sandy: I have a question here that someone wants to ask.
Maybe you want to stop the show.
So one of the questions is how
to avoid reconstruction and the data,
so I would point you at what the US Census does.
They're well understood techniques
for how you have to aggregate things
and add a little bit of noise.
And there's fairly strong proofs of of that.
Plus, in the case of census sorts of techniques,
there's a 100 years of experience showing that
it's not a problem.
But along with a technical solutions,
there's also legal solutions.
And so I run a group,
which is an alliance of law schools,
to be able to establish policy
and legal regulation
for things like safe paths are the things
that I showed@law.mit.edu
if you're interested in safe paths,
legal opinion is up there at the moment.
And in this case of say the US Census,
or almost any census department, that
People that are participating there
are under strong legal constraints,
not to try to re identify things
not to be able to use the data
for anything but the stated purpose.
And they're audited, very, very regular.
It's a little bit like a bank,
you can't steal bank money from the bank
if you work in the bank,
because they check you too often.
And the combination of legal constraints auditing
and sort of fundamental nature of the algorithms,
it gives a very strong guarantee that
there won't be re identification.
For instance, the Privacy Protection bodies in Europe
have all endorsed this type of method for battling coven,
but also in general
for information sources census like information sources
that are in the public good.
Ramesh: Excellent.
So there's on who which entities do you think will do?
Which entities?
Do you create this apps and programs and promote adoption?
Will it be state or governments or NGOs
or state governments?
So we think a combination of them things,
some will be promoted by national governments,
because it matches up with the National Health System,
which is to be privacy preserving someone to the state
and cities, but also taking position.
So even companies that
have 10s of we start using their own app.
That one in the National Bank,
because an individual
who works in you know of a factory with let's say,
10,000 employees is still part of the city's state
and part of the nation as they go out.
So because it's open source,
and we have all the sources to help you build the solutions
any of those entities you are states.
Duty, national Oregon corporate entity,
we encourage you to use this apps.
And we have all the tools for you,
including instruction materials to build an app
for yourself,
whether you use the safe plus logo or not,
it's up to you.
Sandy: So the the question of
who provides the apps will be something
that is not decided instantly.
Different countries will have
somewhat different policies about it.
One of the concerns is if a company requires
these sorts of things,
how would they make that not invasive?
And but on the other hand,
the company is required to make sure
that each employee doesn't infect the other people.
If they infect the other people or the customers,
then the company is at fault.
So they have a duty to protect the other people.
And they certify that the people
that they're hiring are safe in some way.
So those are some of the tensions.
I'll just go up five levels and point out that
UN the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Secure Digital identity is one of the 17
sustainable development goals
for exactly this sort of reason.
People have a right to control their identity
or right to be able to show
that they own things show that their new show
whatever they have to do as part of the legal system.
And that needs to be privacy preserving.
It needs to be safe from abuse by authoritarian governments.
And there's a whole sort of literature about this.
And international bodies
that are set up to be able to certify solutions
for this that match those sorts of things.
One of the ones I would point you to is
an organization called ID 2020,
which is working at making digital identity
Safe across all the different countries.
And they work in coordination
with the UN to be able to set up sort of minimum standards
for safety for doing these sorts of things.
Ramesh: Excellent. I'm
so I guess we are there waiting
for some questions
on there's a business related question Sandy for us.
What if things like opa Alonso are not respected
by authoritarian regimes?
Sandy: So there's, this is this is a classic problem.
What happens if you want respected?
The general solution,
and it's not a perfect solution is
that you need to have auditing
and visibility of the algorithms
outside of the nation state.
Well, imagine that you have some small country
and a bad guy gets to be the head.
Okay? And he wants to kill all people
that are of certain ethnic background,
which has happened and not so distant memory, unfortunately.
How do you detect that that's happening?
And how do you counter it?
The only way that I've heard that makes any sense at all,
is that the sort of autopilot type systems
have to be visible outside of the country
where the dictator doesn't have sway.
So for instance,
Kenya just set up a national identity system.
And people are.
Why would you trust Kenya with your digital data?
Right? Well,
because actually the people that are transport
and know what's happening on the system,
are international telcos, international banks,
international aid societies,
because those are the ones that provide authentication.
Those are the ones that do transport sensitivity.
Information.
And so they're all of a dictator could go
and shut down individuals within the country
that would be immediately visible around the world.
That's not a solution.
But at least it's detection.
And it provides a incentive for the dictator
and not to abuse things.
You can always find things that are physical things,
I can send soldiers to every house.
But the goal is with these digital systems is to make
that sort of solution.
The digital, perverting the digital solution,
more expensive than sending
the soldiers house to house
in terms of international reputation,
international trade,
international sanctions and so forth.
So that's the type of system
that is happening being envisioned may not be perfect,
it won't be perfect, and we'll make it better all the time.
Ramesh: So there's a I think
that approaching the last one,
maybe we'll take the last one.
The question was a bit more about what's the V one
versus V two versus three, four for us?
And I think we explained it earlier,
though, in and related question was,
how long does the data stay in the system?
And is the ability to scrub it or raise it to 30 days?
So those two are related questions,
because in every version in V one, and V two,
especially have safe paths,
the healthy person node has to upload their GPS
or Bluetooth coordinates.
So that's,
so you don't have to worry about deleting them at all.
In version three,
we do have a notion of an exchange
between the infected person
and the healthy person's data on the server.
And then clearly,
we need to make sure that the data is deleted
within 14 days or 30 days as per the Epidemics guidelines.
Sandy: Okay, I think that's pretty much it.
Thank you all.
And I look forward to hearing from you hope
you appreciated this.
Thank you.
Ramesh: Thank you very much