How does contact tracing work? | Lina Moses, Paul-Olivier Dehaye & Greg Nadeau | TEDxMidAtlantic
Lina Moses, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, Greg Nadeau |
TEDxMidAtlantic
• March 2019
This talk was recorded on April 21, 2020, in a special live "Coronavirus Conversation."
Experts agree that getting our economy back online is dependent on several conditions, including widespread testing, continued social controls, and contact tracing. Many countries have implemented smartphone applications that can help detect exposure to known-infected individuals, but they often sacrifice privacy. How does contact tracing work, and is it possible to maintain a reasonable level of privacy?
In this talk, you'll hear from epidemiologist Dr. Lina Moses from Tulane University; Paul-Olivier Dehaye, mathematician, data privacy advocate, and founder of PersonalData.io; and Greg Nadeau and John Werner from the Covid SafePaths team. Covid SafePaths is an open-source, privacy-preserving, location tracking toolkit being developed by a team of volunteers utilizing MIT’s differential privacy technology, in addition to the new proximity detection APIs announced by Google and Apple.
Dr. Lina Moses is an epidemiologist and disease ecologist. Her primary interest is the control of viral zoonoses transmitted from small mammals. Lina utilizes methods from epidemiology and ecology to understand the interface of human, animal, and pathogen. In addition to observational and quasi-experimental field studies, she is interested implementing human and animal surveillance for zoonoses at the community level. The ultimate goal of her research is to develop interventions to respond quickly to and reduce primary animal-to-human transmission of pathogens.
Paul-Olivier Dehaye is a mathematician and privacy advocate based in Geneva, Switzerland, and is the founder of PersonalData.io, a Geneva-based nonprofit promoting digital rights in the field of data protection. He was also instrumental in documenting details relevant to reporting the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which has motivated and informed his later work.
John Werner has created a career out of bringing ideas, networks, and people together to generate powerful results. John's deep curiosity and penchant for problem-solving led him to a diverse set of roles spanning many fields and interests. John channels his passion and curiosity into cultivating platforms for thought and exchange. John is a founding board member of Path Check, Inc., a new nonprofit coming out of MIT. Path Check is creating a software platform for public health to help reopen the economy, starting with test-and-trace and later at-home coordination and return-to-work certification. Hundreds of people have volunteered to support the effort, and the group is in discussions with the WHO, Mayo Clinic, and over 20 different countries and US states and cities that are seeking a solution. John also founded TEDxBeaconStreet and is a co-founder of TEDxMIT. John is an MIT Connection Science Fellow at the MIT School of Engineering. John is also a managing director at Link Ventures and the chief network officer, SVP Corporate Development of Cogo Labs. Previously, John was a VP of a Y-Combinator augmented-reality startup based in Silicon Valley. John has also served as the head of new ventures at the MIT’s Camera Culture Group.
Greg Nadeau's life work has been dedicated to improving learning opportunities for all through both enterprise-scale system changes and human-scale interactions and experiences. First on the public side, as Massachusetts' first state education CTO and, since 2001, as a consultant to other state, local, and national education agencies, Greg has brought disruptive system-thinking and compassionate commitment to enable personalized, competency-based learning at the scale of the internet. Greg now serves as program manager for COVID SafePaths, a global movement to develop free, open-source, privacy-by-design tools for residents, public health officials, and larger communities to flatten the curve of COVID-19, reduce fear, and prevent a surveillance-state response to the pandemic.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx