TY - GEN
T1 - Networked systems as witnesses
T2 - 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2021
AU - Asif, Sana
AU - Jun, Byungjin
AU - Bustamante, Fabian E.
AU - Rula, John P.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank the anonymous shepherds and reviewers for their detailed and helpful feedback. We are also grateful to Walter Willinger for fruitful discussions in the early stages of this work. This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award CNS-2027922. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agencies.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/11/2
Y1 - 2021/11/2
N2 - While non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as stay-at-home, shelter-in-place, and school closures are considered the most effective ways to limit the spread of infectious diseases, their use is generally controversial given the political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues they raise. Part of the challenge is the non-obvious link between the level of compliance with such measures and their effectiveness. In this paper, we argue that users' demand on networked services can act as a proxy for the social distancing behavior of communities, offering a new approach to evaluate these measures' effectiveness. We leverage the vantage point of one of the largest worldwide CDNs together with publicly available datasets of mobile users' behavior, to examine the relationship between changes in user demand on the CDN and different interventions including stay-at-home/shelter-in-place, mask mandates, and school closures. As networked systems become integral parts of our everyday lives, they can act as witnesses of our individual and collective actions. Our study illustrates the potential value of this new role.
AB - While non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as stay-at-home, shelter-in-place, and school closures are considered the most effective ways to limit the spread of infectious diseases, their use is generally controversial given the political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues they raise. Part of the challenge is the non-obvious link between the level of compliance with such measures and their effectiveness. In this paper, we argue that users' demand on networked services can act as a proxy for the social distancing behavior of communities, offering a new approach to evaluate these measures' effectiveness. We leverage the vantage point of one of the largest worldwide CDNs together with publicly available datasets of mobile users' behavior, to examine the relationship between changes in user demand on the CDN and different interventions including stay-at-home/shelter-in-place, mask mandates, and school closures. As networked systems become integral parts of our everyday lives, they can act as witnesses of our individual and collective actions. Our study illustrates the potential value of this new role.
KW - CDN
KW - COVID-19
KW - internet measurement
KW - pandemic
KW - user demand
KW - user mobility
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85118970127&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85118970127&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3487552.3487831
DO - 10.1145/3487552.3487831
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85118970127
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 487
EP - 506
BT - IMC 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Internet Measurement Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 2 November 2021 through 4 November 2021
ER -
