Computer Science

The ongoing COVID-19 vaccination campaign has so far targeted less than 10% of the world population, and, even in countries where the campaign has started, many citizens will not receive their doses for many months. There is clear evidence that previous shortages of COVID-19 related goods (e.g., masks and COVID-19 tests) and services pushed customers, and vendors, towards illicit online trade occurring on dark web marketplaces. Is this happening also with vaccines? Here, we report on our effort to continuously monitor 164 dark web marketplaces. By April 20, we found 214 listings offering a COVID-19 vaccine, 77 of which offering officially approved vaccines and 25 fabricated proofs of vaccination. The number of currently active listings is 34, including eight listings offering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, six the Moderna, two the AstraZeneca/Oxford, two the Sputinik V vaccine, and nine offering fabricated proofs of vaccination. Illicit trade of uncertified COVID-19 vaccines poses a concrete threat to public health and risks to undermine public confidence towards vaccination.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. The combination of a public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic have pushed customers and vendors towards the shadow economy. In particular, dark web marketplaces (DWMs), commercial websites accessible via free software, have gained significant popularity. Here, we analyse 851,199 listings extracted from 30 DWMs between January 1, 2020 and November 16, 2020. We identify 788 listings directly related to COVID-19 products and monitor the temporal evolution of product categories including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), medicines (e.g., hydroxyclorochine), and medical frauds. Finally, we compare trends in their temporal evolution with variations in public attention, as measured by Twitter posts and Wikipedia page visits. We reveal how the online shadow economy has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the importance of a continuous monitoring of DWMs, especially now that real vaccines are available and in short supply. We anticipate our analysis will be of interest both to researchers and public agencies focused on the protection of public health.

The pandemic originated by coronavirus(covid-19), name coined by World Health Organization during the first month in 2020. Actually, almost all the countries presented covid19 positive cases and governments are choosing different health policies to stop the infection and many research groups are working on patients data to understand the virus, at the same time scientists are looking for a vacuum to enhance imnulogy system to tack covid19 virus. One of top countries with more infections is Brazil, until August 11 had a total of 3,112,393 cases. Research Foundation of Sao Paulo State(Fapesp) released a dataset, it was an innovative in collaboration with hospitals(Einstein, Sirio-Libanes), laboratory(Fleury) and Sao Paulo University to foster reseach on this trend topic. The present paper presents an exploratory analysis of the datasets, using a Data Mining Approach, and some inconsistencies are found, i.e. NaN values, null references values for analytes, outliers on results of analytes, encoding issues. The results were cleaned datasets for future studies, but at least a 20\% of data were discarded because of non numerical, null values and numbers out of reference range.

Smart devices are becoming inseparable from daily lives and are improving fast for providing intelligent services and remote monitoring and control. In order to provide personalized and customized services more personal data collection is required. Consequently, intelligent services are becoming intensely personal and they raise concerns regarding data privacy and security. In this paper data privacy requirements in a smart home environment equipped with "Internet of Things" are described and privacy challenges for data and models are addressed.

Since SARS-CoV-2 started spreading in Europe in early 2020, there has been a strong call for technical solutions to combat or contain the pandemic, with contact tracing apps at the heart of the debates. The EU's General Daten Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires controllers to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) where their data processing is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms (Art. 35 GDPR). A DPIA is a structured risk analysis that identifies and evaluates possible consequences of data processing relevant to fundamental rights and describes the measures envisaged to address these risks or expresses the inability to do so. Based on the Standard Data Protection Model (SDM), we present a scientific DPIA which thoroughly examines three published contact tracing app designs that are considered to be the most "privacy-friendly": PEPP-PT, DP-3T and a concept summarized by Chaos Computer Club member Linus Neumann, all of which process personal health data. The DPIA starts with an analysis of the processing context and some expected use cases. Then, the processing activities are described by defining a realistic processing purpose. This is followed by the legal assessment and threshold analysis. Finally, we analyse the weak points, the risks and determine appropriate protective measures. We show that even decentralized implementations involve numerous serious weaknesses and risks. Legally, consent is unfit as legal ground hence data must be processed based on a law. We also found that measures to realize the rights of data subjects and affected people are not sufficient. Last but not least, we show that anonymization must be understood as a continuous process, which aims at separating the personal reference and is based on a mix of legal, organizational and technical measures. All currently available proposals lack such an explicit separation process.

This document concerns data readiness in the context of machine learning and Natural Language Processing. It describes how an organization may proceed to identify, make available, validate, and prepare data to facilitate automated analysis methods. The contents of the document is based on the practical challenges and frequently asked questions we have encountered in our work as an applied research institute with helping organizations and companies, both in the public and private sectors, to use data in their business processes.

Vector control strategies are central to the mitigation and containment of COVID-19 and have come in the form of municipal ordinances that restrict the operational status of public and private spaces and associated services. Yet, little is known about specific population responses in terms of risk behaviors. To help understand the impact of those vector control variable strategies, a multi-week, multi-site observational study was undertaken outside of 19 New York City medical facilities during the peak of the city's initial COVID-19 wave (03/22/20-05/19/20). The aim was to capture perishable data of the touch, destination choice, and PPE usage behavior of individuals egressing hospitals and urgent care centers. A major goal was to establish an empirical basis for future research on the way people interact with three-dimensional vector environments. Anonymized data were collected via smart phones. Each data record includes the time, data, and location of an individual leaving a healthcare facility, their routing, interactions with the build environment, other individuals, and themselves. Most records also note their PPE usage, destination, intermediary stops, and transportation choices. The records were linked with 61 socio-economic factors by the facility zip code and 7 contemporaneous weather factors and the merged in a unified shapefile in an ARCGIS system. This paper describes the project team and protocols used to produce over 5,100 publicly accessible observational records and an affiliated codebook that can be used to study linkages between individual behaviors and on-the-ground conditions.

We describe an ecosystem for teaching data science (DS) to engineers which blends theory, methods, and applications, developed at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Universidad de Chile, over the last three years. This initiative has been motivated by the increasing demand for DS qualifications both from academic and professional environments. The ecosystem is distributed in a collaborative fashion across three departments in the above Faculty and includes postgraduate programmes, courses, professional diplomas, data repositories, laboratories, trainee programmes, and internships. By sharing our teaching principles and the innovative components of our approach to teaching DS, we hope our experience can be useful to those developing their own DS programmes and ecosystems. The open challenges and future plans for our ecosystem are also discussed at the end of the article.

Recently, tremendous interest has been devoted to develop data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings, where various kinds of information can be processed. However, applying the appropriate data fusion strategy to design an efficient energy efficiency system is not straightforward; it requires a priori knowledge of existing fusion strategies, their applications and their properties. To this regard, seeking to provide the energy research community with a better understanding of data fusion strategies in building energy saving systems, their principles, advantages, and potential applications, this paper proposes an extensive survey of existing data fusion mechanisms deployed to reduce excessive consumption and promote sustainability. We investigate their conceptualizations, advantages, challenges and drawbacks, as well as performing a taxonomy of existing data fusion strategies and other contributing factors. Following, a comprehensive comparison of the state-of-the-art data fusion based energy efficiency frameworks is conducted using various parameters, including data fusion level, data fusion techniques, behavioral change influencer, behavioral change incentive, recorded data, platform architecture, IoT technology and application scenario. Moreover, a novel method for electrical appliance identification is proposed based on the fusion of 2D local texture descriptors, where 1D power signals are transformed into 2D space and treated as images. The empirical evaluation, conducted on three real datasets, shows promising performance, in which up to 99.68% accuracy and 99.52% F1 score have been attained. In addition, various open research challenges and future orientations to improve data fusion based energy efficiency ecosystems are explored.

In this study, we investigate the scientific research response from the early stages of the pandemic, and we review key findings on how the early warning systems developed in previous epidemics responded to contain the virus. The data records are analysed with commutable statistical methods, including R Studio, Bibliometrix package, and the Web of Science data mining tool. We identified few different clusters, containing references to exercise, inflammation, smoking, obesity and many additional factors. From the analysis on Covid-19 and vaccine, we discovered that although the USA is leading in volume of scientific research on Covid 19 vaccine, the leading 3 research institutions (Fudan, Melbourne, Oxford) are not based in the USA. Hence, it is difficult to predict which country would be first to produce a Covid 19 vaccine.