IMR: MM-1A: ADDRESS: Augment, Denoise and Debias cRowdsourced mEasurements for Statistical Synthesis of internet access characterization

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

The U.S. suffers from digital inequality that stretches in multiple dimensions. Several demographic and socioeconomic factors, such as race, ethnicity, and income, as well as population density, are often indicators of Internet availability and quality. To fully bridge the Internet access divide and best allocate available funding, policymakers need to understand the state of Internet accessibility and quality at fine-grained geographical granularity. The goal of this project is to make the best use of crowdsourced Internet measurement data to estimate the distribution of fixed Internet quality at different levels of geospatial granularity with as high accuracy as possible. To do so, the projects plans to make the following contributions: (i) to develop a Broadband Offerings Tool that aggregates ISP broadband plan offerings and links that data with crowdsourced measurements and socioeconomic data to predict user subscription plans, (ii) to develop new methodologies and algorithms that can detect noisy data points, such as speed test measurements that report bottlenecks in WiFi access or remote peering links, which bias the understanding of Internet quality, (iii) to propose new statistical techniques that use the resulting dataset to output a debiased dataset that removes the spatial, temporal, and demographic biases inherent in crowdsourced Internet measurement data. Digital inequality continues to persist in the U.S., deepened by the work-from-home and remote schooling resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The outputs of this work will be used to report the distribution of Internet quality in a region and predict that of regions for which less data is available. This work will also reveal demographic variables that most influence the U.S. digital divide. The outcomes of this project can be used to inform local, state and federal governments about where investments must be made to ensure all Americans have access to high quality Internet. A project website will be established, which will contain information about research methodology, models and outcomes. The likely URL is broadband.cs.ucsb.edu. The website will be maintained for the duration of the project, and at least a year thereafter. 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.