Strategies for COVID-19 Presence Tracing
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
12 PM PST / 9 PM CEST
Overview
Contact tracing in many countries initially focused on those in close proximity to someone infectious for COVID-19, and Bluetooth-based protocols for automated exposure notification followed suit. But because COVID-19 is also spread via aerosols, contacts at the other side of a room are also at substantial risk of infection, especially in poorly ventilated venues and with more infectious strains. QR code scans or Bluetooth beacons can be used to match those who were present at the same venue at the same time as an infectious person. This panel will explore different designs for presence tracing protocols, and the rationales behind them.
Co-hosted with The Big Data Institute at
The University of Oxford
Meet the Speakers

Merrin MacLeod
Merrin MacLeod is a project lead for the exposure notification app used by New Zealand.

Vincent Roca
After a PhD from Grenoble INP in 1996, Vincent Roca joined the University Paris 6 as Associate Professor in 1997, and Inria as a researcher in 2000.... Active IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) participant, member of PRIVATICS since 2012, he is now leading this Inria research team specialised in privacy and personal data protection. He focuses in particular on the privacy risks associated with the use of smartphones and Internet of Things devices, and on consent management on the web. He is also co-author with PRIVATICS colleagues of the ROBERT Covid exposure notification protocol and the CLEA cluster exposure notification protocol, the two digital tracing protocols of the French TousAntiCovid national app. Read more

Justus Benzler
Justus is a medical epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin, Germany. After several years of clinical practice in obstetrics... and surgery in Germany and then as district medical officer in Burkina Faso, he specialized in medical informatics. His work within Infectious Disease Surveillance at RKI since 2002 was intermitted by multi-year assignments with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and with WHO, where he focused on dengue and yellow fever prevention and control, respectively. In spring 2020, Justus participated in the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative, before Germany adopted the Google-Apple ENF. Since then he has worked on the development and improvement of Corona-Warn-App, the German national proximity tracing tool, from the epidemiological and data science perspective. Read more

Edouard Bugnion
Edouard Bugnion joined EPFL in 2012, where his focus is on datacenter systems. His areas of interest include operating systems, datacenter... infrastructure (systems and networking), and computer architecture. Before joining EPFL, Edouard spent 18 years in the US, where he studied at Stanford and co-founded two startups and served as their Chief Technology Officer: VMware and Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco).
Prof. Bugnion is a Fellow of the ACM, winner of the 2009 ACM Software System Award (for VMware 1.0), of a SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (for Disco, SOSP 97), and of Best Paper Awards at SOSP, OSDI and Eurosys. Prof Bugnion played an important role in the development of the DP3T protocol, the CrowdNotifier protocol, and of the SwissCovid GAEN app. He serves on the National Scientific COVID-19 Task Force advising the government of Switzerland. Read more

James Petrie
James Petrie designed the decentralized Bluetooth protocol initially used by Covid Watch (which he co-founded), and contributed to the design... of the TCN protocol for decentralized exposure notification. James is currently an Applied Math PhD student at the University of Waterloo, and Head of Research at WeHealth. Read more
Coordinating Committee Co-Chairs
Joanna Masel, PhD
Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at The University of Arizona
Luca Ferretti, PhD
Senior Researcher in Statistical Genetics and Pathogen DynamicsBig Data Institute, The University of Oxford
Webinars On-Demand
Watch recordings of past events, anytime. Contributors include leading experts in exposure science, epidemiology, virology, public health, infectious disease, privacy, cybersecurity, and more.
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