One of the most notable global transportation trends is the accelerated pace of development in vehicle automation technologies. Uncertainty surrounds the future of automated mobility as there is no clear consensus on potential adoption patterns, ownership versus shared use status and travel impacts. Adding to this uncertainty is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that has triggered profound changes in mobility behaviors as well as accelerated the adoption of new technologies at an unprecedented rate. This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on willingness to adopt the emerging new technology of self-driving vehicles. Using data from a survey disseminated in June 2020 to 700 respondents in contiguous United States, we perform a difference-in-difference regression to analyze the shift in willingness to use autonomous vehicles as part of a shared fleet before and during the pandemic. The results reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has a positive and highly significant impact on consideration of autonomous vehicles. This shift is present regardless of techsavviness, gender or political views. Individuals who are younger, left-leaning and frequent users of shared modes of travel are expected to become more likely to use autonomous vehicles once offered. Understanding the effects of these attributes on the increase in consideration of AVs is important for policy making, as these effects provide a guide to predicting adoption of autonomous vehicles - once available - and to identify segments of the population likely to be more resistant to adopting AVs.
In the 21st century, the industry of drones, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), has witnessed a rapid increase with its large number of airspace users. The tremendous benefits of this technology in civilian applications such as hostage rescue and parcel delivery will integrate smart cities in the future. Nowadays, the affordability of commercial drones expands its usage at a large scale. However, the development of drone technology is associated with vulnerabilities and threats due to the lack of efficient security implementations. Moreover, the complexity of UAVs in software and hardware triggers potential security and privacy issues. Thus, posing significant challenges for the industry, academia, and governments. In this paper, we extensively survey the security and privacy issues of UAVs by providing a systematic classification at four levels: Hardware-level, Software-level, Communication-level, and Sensor-level. In particular, for each level, we thoroughly investigate (1) common vulnerabilities affecting UAVs for potential attacks from malicious actors, (2) existing threats that are jeopardizing the civilian application of UAVs, (3) active and passive attacks performed by the adversaries to compromise the security and privacy of UAVs, (4) possible countermeasures and mitigation techniques to protect UAVs from such malicious activities. In addition, we summarize the takeaways that highlight lessons learned about UAVs' security and privacy issues. Finally, we conclude our survey by presenting the critical pitfalls and suggesting promising future research directions for security and privacy of UAVs.
Since the World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, curbing the spread of the virus has become an international priority. It has greatly affected people's lifestyles. In this article, we observe and analyze the impact of the pandemic on people's lives using changes in smartphone application usage. First, through observing the daily usage change trends of all users during the pandemic, we can understand and analyze the effects of restrictive measures and policies during the pandemic on people's lives. In addition, it is also helpful for the government and health departments to take more appropriate restrictive measures in the case of future pandemics. Second, we defined the usage change features and found 9 different usage change patterns during the pandemic according to clusters of users and show the diversity of daily usage changes. It helps to understand and analyze the different impacts of the pandemic and restrictive measures on different types of people in more detail. Finally, according to prediction models, we discover the main related factors of each usage change type from user preferences and demographic information. It helps to predict changes in smartphone activity during future pandemics or when other restrictive measures are implemented, which may become a new indicator to judge and manage the risks of measures or events.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have developed and deployed contact tracing technologies to curb the spread of the disease by locating and isolating people who have been in contact with coronavirus carriers. Subsequently, understanding why people install and use contact tracing apps is becoming central to their effectiveness and impact. This paper analyzes situations where centralized mass surveillance technologies are deployed simultaneously with a voluntary contact tracing mobile app. We use this parallel deployment as a natural experiment that tests how attitudes toward mass deployments affect people's installation of the contact tracing app. Based on a representative survey of Israelis (n=519), our findings show that positive attitudes toward mass surveillance were related to a reduced likelihood of installing contact tracing apps and an increased likelihood of uninstalling them. These results also hold when controlling for privacy concerns about the contact tracing app, attitudes toward the app, trust in authorities, and demographic properties. Similar reasoning may also be relevant for crowding out voluntary participation in data collection systems.
Since the World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, curbing the spread of the virus has become an international priority. It has greatly affected people's lifestyles. In this article, we observe and analyze the impact of the pandemic on people's lives using changes in smartphone application usage. First, through observing the daily usage change trends of all users during the pandemic, we can understand and analyze the effects of restrictive measures and policies during the pandemic on people's lives. In addition, it is also helpful for the government and health departments to take more appropriate restrictive measures in the case of future pandemics. Second, we defined the usage change features and found 9 different usage change patterns during the pandemic according to clusters of users and show the diversity of daily usage changes. It helps to understand and analyze the different impacts of the pandemic and restrictive measures on different types of people in more detail. Finally, according to prediction models, we discover the main related factors of each usage change type from user preferences and demographic information. It helps to predict changes in smartphone activity during future pandemics or when other restrictive measures are implemented, which may become a new indicator to judge and manage the risks of measures or events.
Trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency pervade law, public health, and other non-computing domains, which have developed policies to guide how to balance the two in conditions of uncertainty. While computer science also commonly studies accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, their policy implications remain poorly examined. Drawing on risk assessment practices in the US, we argue that, since examining these trade-offs has been useful for guiding governance in other domains, we need to similarly reckon with these trade-offs in governing computer systems. We focus our analysis on distributed machine learning systems. Understanding the policy implications in this area is particularly urgent because such systems, which include autonomous vehicles, tend to be high-stakes and safety-critical. We 1) describe how the trade-off takes shape for these systems, 2) highlight gaps between existing US risk assessment standards and what these systems require to be properly assessed, and 3) make specific calls to action to facilitate accountability when hypothetical risks concerning the accuracy-efficiency trade-off become realized as accidents in the real world. We close by discussing how such accountability mechanisms encourage more just, transparent governance aligned with public values.
This paper has the goal of evaluating how changes in mobility has affected the infection spread of Covid-19 throughout the 2020-2021 years. However, identifying a "clean" causal relation is not an easy task due to a high number of non-observable (behavioral) effects. We suggest the usage of Google Trends and News-based indexes as controls for some of these behavioral effects and we find that a 1\% increase in residential mobility (i.e. a reduction in overall mobility) have significant impacts for reducing both Covid-19 cases (at least 3.02\% on a one-month horizon) and deaths (at least 2.43\% at the two-weeks horizon) over the 2020-2021 sample. We also evaluate the effects of mobility on Covid-19 spread on the restricted sample (only 2020) where vaccines were not available. The results of diminishing mobility over cases and deaths on the restricted sample are still observable (with similar magnitudes in terms of residential mobility) and cumulative higher, as the effects of restricting workplace mobility turns to be also significant: a 1\% decrease in workplace mobility diminishes cases around 1\% and deaths around 2\%.
Road-vehicle accidents are mostly due to human errors, and many such accidents could be avoided by continuously monitoring the driver. Driver monitoring (DM) is a topic of growing interest in the automotive industry, and it will remain relevant for all vehicles that are not fully autonomous, and thus for decades for the average vehicle owner. The present paper focuses on the first step of DM, which consists in characterizing the state of the driver. Since DM will be increasingly linked to driving automation (DA), this paper presents a clear view of the role of DM at each of the six SAE levels of DA. This paper surveys the state of the art of DM, and then synthesizes it, providing a unique, structured, polychotomous view of the many characterization techniques of DM. Informed by the survey, the paper characterizes the driver state along the five main dimensions--called here "(sub)states"--of drowsiness, mental workload, distraction, emotions, and under the influence. The polychotomous view of DM is presented through a pair of interlocked tables that relate these states to their indicators (e.g., the eye-blink rate) and the sensors that can access each of these indicators (e.g., a camera). The tables factor in not only the effects linked directly to the driver, but also those linked to the (driven) vehicle and the (driving) environment. They show, at a glance, to concerned researchers, equipment providers, and vehicle manufacturers (1) most of the options they have to implement various forms of advanced DM systems, and (2) fruitful areas for further research and innovation.
The severity of the coronavirus pandemic necessitates the need of effective administrative decisions. Over 4 lakh people in India succumbed to COVID-19, with over 3 crore confirmed cases, and still counting. The threat of a plausible third wave continues to haunt millions. In this ever changing dynamic of the virus, predictive modeling methods can serve as an integral tool. The pandemic has further triggered an unprecedented usage of social media. This paper aims to propose a method for harnessing social media, specifically Twitter, to predict the upcoming scenarios related to COVID-19 cases. In this study, we seek to understand how the surges in COVID-19 related tweets can indicate rise in the cases. This prospective analysis can be utilised to aid administrators about timely resource allocation to lessen the severity of the damage. Using word embeddings to capture the semantic meaning of tweets, we identify Significant Dimensions (SDs).Our methodology predicts the rise in cases with a lead time of 15 days and 30 days with R2 scores of 0.80 and 0.62 respectively. Finally, we explain the thematic utility of the SDs.
The present cross-disciplinary research explores pedestrian-autonomous vehicle interactions in a safe, virtual environment. We first present contemporary tools in the field and then propose the design and development of a new application that facilitates pedestrian point of view research. We conduct a three-step user experience experiment where participants answer questions before and after using the application in various scenarios. Behavioral results in virtuality, especially when there were consequences, tend to simulate real life sufficiently well to make design choices, and we received valuable insights into human/vehicle interaction. Our tool seemed to start raising participant awareness of autonomous vehicles and their capabilities and limitations, which is an important step in overcoming public distrust of AVs. Further, studying how users respect or take advantage of AVs may help inform future operating mode indicator design as well as algorithm biases that might support socially-optimal AV operation.
Privacy is a major good for users of personalized services such as recommender systems. When applied to the field of health informatics, privacy concerns of users may be amplified, but the possible utility of such services is also high. Despite availability of technologies such as k-anonymity, differential privacy, privacy-aware recommendation, and personalized privacy trade-offs, little research has been conducted on the users' willingness to share health data for usage in such systems. In two conjoint-decision studies (sample size n=521), we investigate importance and utility of privacy-preserving techniques related to sharing of personal health data for k-anonymity and differential privacy. Users were asked to pick a preferred sharing scenario depending on the recipient of the data, the benefit of sharing data, the type of data, and the parameterized privacy. Users disagreed with sharing data for commercial purposes regarding mental illnesses and with high de-anonymization risks but showed little concern when data is used for scientific purposes and is related to physical illnesses. Suggestions for health recommender system development are derived from the findings.