RAPID: Measuring the Internet during Novel Coronavirus to Evaluate Quarantine (RAPID-MINSEQ)

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The world is employing social distancing, work-from-home, and study-from-home to limit COVID-19's spread until the availability of early detection and a vaccine for COVID-19. Implementation of these policies varies across the U.S. and globally due to local circumstances. A common consequence is a huge shift in Internet use, with university dormitories and high schools emptying and home use increasing. The goal of this project is to observe this shift, globally, through changes in Internet address usage, allowing observation of early reactions to COVID and, one hopes, a future shift back. This project plans to develop two complementary methods of assessing Internet use by measuring address activity and how it changes relative to historical trends. The project will directly measure Internet address use globally based on continuous, ongoing measurements of more than 4 million IPv4 networks. The project will also directly measure Internet address use in network traffic at a regional Internet exchange point where multiple Internet providers interconnect. The first approach provides a global picture, while the second provides a more detailed but regional picture; together they will help evaluate measurement accuracy. This project allows to capture an improved global picture of how different parts of the world react to COVID-19, as seen through their use of the Internet. In particular, the results from this research will help understand changing behavior of networks compared to historical data, and provide a new method based on address usage to characterize how people are staying home, and to look for the effectiveness and onset of work-from-home and shelter-in-place. The project website will be at https://ant.isi.edu/minceq. The project will make all new data generated by this project available at no cost to researchers at https://ant.isi.edu/datasets. The project website and data will persist indefinitely; as of 2020 the website already provides five years of archival data that serves as a baseline. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.