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XA Credit Score For Your COVID-19 Risk? USC Gets Federal Funds to Create a Location-Based Mobile App
Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.

Researchers at the University of Southern California, Emory University and the University of Texas Health Science Center have received a federal research grant to create a mobile app for contact tracing the novel coronavirus that hopes to track a person's real-time location and symptoms "for quarantine and decontamination." The project would use collected data to calculate a type of credit score of your COVID-19 risk and uses that to help calculate an aggregate risk score for locations like your neighborhood grocery store over time.
As part of the National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research award, created for situations like the ongoing pandemic, USC's Cyrus Shahabi, a professor of computer science, electrical engineering and spatial sciences, and chair of the Computer Science Department was granted $67,185. The project, entitled "REACT, for REAal-time Contact Tracing and risk monitoring via privacy-enhanced tracking of users' locations and symptoms" is a multi-university with researchers at Emory University and the University of Texas Health Science Center, with total funding at $151,477. Work officially begins on Friday.
The universities hope to have a working mobile app by August, in time for the start of the fall semester, Shahabi said.
It's yet another digital twist on contact tracing, a pillar of public health and infectious disease control that can be onerous detective work. It involves identifying those who have been in contact with infected persons to help isolate and limit spread of a virus, especially during epidemic — or, in this case, pandemic conditions.
Enabling such efforts have become a recent focus by governmental entities and organizations. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has said that contact tracing capacity and expanded testing are crucial measures that need to be in place before stay-at-home orders can be loosened. That includes establishing a contact tracing "workforce" and developing a statewide training academy to train 10,000 workers to do contact tracing.
Shahabi envisions a use case where people with higher personal risk scores might decide to stay home or get tested for COVID-19, and where areas that are deemed high-risk because people are later known to be infected, like a particular supermarket, might be avoided. Policymakers could warn the public to avoid an area that's known to be a potential hotspot of infection.
Graphic by Haotian Mai/USCassets.rebelmouse.io
The main problem with contact tracing is that it relies on human memory, in this case over as long as a 14-day period, which can be especially faulty, Shahabi said. It also has a built-in delay between when an infected person is identified and when those who have been exposed are notified. Immediate isolation is only possible with digital contact tracing, he said.
A recent Science research report found that SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19, is spreading "too fast to be contained by manual contact tracing, but could be controlled if this process was faster, more efficient and happened at scale" using digital methods like a mobile app.
While companies like Apple and Google who have engaged in a rare collaborative effort to create an "exposure notification API" that would be utilized to inform people via bluetooth signals on their phone that they may have been near an infected person -- allegedly without jeopardizing privacy.
Shahabi said that Apple and Google's proposed method could provide many false positives or negatives, because it doesn't take into account factors like whether a person is wearing a mask or how close they are. For those who are warned, it could be unclear as to what to do about it, and eventually people may become inured to alarm bells that are raised because of it, he said.
Countries such as South Korea or China have used location-based digitized contact tracing. However, it has only been successful because citizens are forced to download it, opt into location monitoring, and regularly check in or otherwise be visited by enforcement authorities, according to Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA who has worked in contact notification for 25 years in areas like HIV in the United States.
"In that setting where there's 100% mandated compliance, it's been shown it can work, in our setting in the United States, I don't see that really happening," Klausner said. "We have enough problems with governors issuing orders and denying free personal movement, that the idea that people are going to be ordered to download apps to monitor their movement is highly unlikely and probably not constitutional."
USC's Doheny Library. upload.wikimedia.org
Privacy advocates have repeatedly raised alarms over efforts by governments in China, South Korea, Israel, and other areas in the world to stop the viral spread through surveillance, and have warned about ensuring that any privacy tradeoffs are narrow and time-limited.
"There's several red flags," said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group. That includes the fact that GPS, when you're not in an area with tall buildings, provides accurate information roughly down to 15 feet. Precise location data isn't accurate enough to do reliable contact tracing. If people choose to limit the specificity of their location data, then it will be even worse.
"Even if I just stay in my house all day, there are probably hundreds of people within a thousand feet of me that I never interact with," Cyphers said.
Shahabi has repeatedly brought up concerns about privacy implications of the work in an interview with dot.LA and in the grant itself, stating that "such use also heightens concerns on individual privacy and data abuse" and that there needs to be "a careful balance or privacy protection with public health benefits."
The app would enable users to control and refine how frequently their data is captured and how detailed it is, the grant states. The grant would also investigate "privacy-preserving" ways to share collected data for further research studies.
Shahabi would aggregate the risk scores for individuals using AI to calculate risk scores for community areas as part of what he wants to call his pandemic tool kit, or Pandemic Risk Evaluation Platform (PREP). He believes that this aggregation would somewhat alleviate individual privacy concerns for public use of the data by policymakers and others, and is also less potentially problematic than the Apple and Google method.
Shahabi said he is working on getting some raw location data from an outside company to begin doing some risk analysis work.
For privacy advocates like Cyphers, the concern is if user location data is ultimately collected and stored by a single entity, it ups the privacy risk to people who participate. And the privacy risks are still "massive" even with low-resolution data, he said. The data can give a general idea of where a person lives and works, plus when the person arrives there and elsewhere. Such cell-site data is used by police to make cases regularly.
Risk scores could also become problematic if a school or employer requires students or workers reveal them as a condition of receiving a benefit, entering a building or returning to their office, Cyphers said. How the scores are created, whether users are informed about what makes them up, and how they're used are all crucial questions that need to be transparently answered.
"When you introduce 'scoring' that takes other factors into account, it complicates everything, and increases the risk that users will be misinformed or discriminated against due to factors beyond their control," Cyphers said.
In China, the government has used Alipay Health Code, giving citizens a QR code inside the app that's colored red, yellow or green to indicate your health status, with the color green enabling you to travel freely. Law enforcement authorities were involved in the app's development, according to China's state-run media.
Klausner, the epidemiologist, said "we generally feel that voluntary notification where we educate people and empower them with tools to do the notification themselves is the most effective (way) and we've built digital tools for them to use over the past few decades," including a new one that lets you notify people swiftly and directly via text or email immediately and directly.
He added: "It's going to be difficult to get Americans to agree to involuntary surveillance" and to agree to download or opt into such location tracking on a basis large enough to be effective.
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Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.
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Netflix’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, But Not That Bad Earnings Report
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Netflix’s second quarter went better than expected, which is to say that it was still pretty bad.
The streaming giant lost 970,000 subscribers from April through June, the company reported Tuesday, marking the first time that Netflix lost paying customers in two consecutive quarters. Most of the losses came in the U.S. and Canada, the company’s most lucrative region in terms of revenue per customer.
Yet earnings reports are often about beating Wall Street’s expectations (even if those estimates are really low) so Tuesday was, in a bizarre way, a good news day for Netflix. The nearly 1 million fewer members is less than half of what Netflix forecasted in April, when it predicted a decline in 2 million customers. Perhaps more importantly, Netflix is predicting a rebound soon: It plans to gain 1 million customers in the current quarter.
Netflix shares jumped more than 7% on the heels of the bad-but-not-that-bad financial report. That put the firm’s stock price at $216.19 as of 3:36 p.m., which is still a far cry from the $691 price back in November.
“It just shows how badly the stock has been whacked that it’s riding so strongly on less bad news than expected,” George Seay, a Netflix shareholder and chairman of Annandale Capital, told CNBC.
The rosy views on Netflix’s quarterly report might not be entirely about the smaller loss in subscribers. The rising share price could reflect confidence in Netflix’s main plans of action—airing commercials and cracking down on password sharing—even if those won’t bear fruit until at least 2023.
Netflix revealed Tuesday that it wants to launch its advertising subscription tier early next year after partnering with Microsoft, which will handle the ad sales and technology. Details are still light, but the idea is to give consumers a cheaper option than the standard monthly price of $15.49, among the most expensive subscriptions available. Consumers are increasingly adopting cheaper, ad-supported plans, a big reason why Netflix’s rivals have gained ground lately.
“We know that there's price sensitivity,” Netflix COO and Chief Product Officer Greg Peters said during an earnings call. “We're bringing a wider range of prices through the ad supported offering—a lower consumer-facing price—to be able to attract a broader set of members.”
Netflix also provided more details on its coming crackdown on password sharing. The company believes there are 100 million households using Netflix without paying for it, a figure that amounts to almost half of its 220 million paying subscriber base. The streaming service is testing two ideas in Latin America to fix this. One is to charge roughly $3 per month to add a new member to an account. Next month, Netflix will try something else: limiting accounts to just one household unless they pay $3 per month to add more homes.
“Our goal is to find an easy-to-use paid sharing offering that we believe works for our members and our business that we can roll out in 2023,” the company said in a letter to shareholders.
Until then, Netflix may need to rely on its content offerings. That was the case during the second quarter, when consumers collectively spent more than 1 billion hours watching the fourth season of “Stranger Things.” The latest installment of the sci-fi franchise was the best English debut in the company’s history.
“We’re executing really well on the content side,” Netflix Co-CEO Reed Hastings said Tuesday when asked what drove the slightly better-than-expected financial results. “If there was a single thing, we might say “Stranger Things.”
“But again,” Hastings added. “We're talking about losing 1 million instead of losing 2 million. So, our excitement is tempered.”
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Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Solid State Batteries Could Reduce EV Carbon Footprint...If They Can Make it Out of the Lab
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Solid state batteries (SSBs) have been touted as the future of energy storage–especially in the EV sector–for what feels like time eternal. Switching from a liquid electrolyte to a solid should allow for faster charging, longer ranges, better safety, and better battery life.
A new study from Transport and Environment (T&E), a European NGO that advocates for cleaner transport, suggests that solid state batteries may have environmental upside.
Let’s address an important caveat here: No mass market consumer EVs are currently powered by solid state batteries. Zero. This is an emerging and complex technology that has yet to prove itself in the real world. Having said that, reasons to continue working on these batteries of the future keep adding up.
The new analysis from T&E claims that switching from current lithium ion batteries to solid state technology could cut the carbon footprint of EVs by 24-39%. Their life-cycle analysis shows that the lion’s share of carbon savings comes from the fact that solid state technology uses less materials. Less material means fewer emissions from the manufacturing process.
The study also outlined areas in the supply chain that would create the most emissions. For SSBs, lithium mining could be a “hotspot’ due to the solid state chemistry requiring an average of 35% more lithium than current nickel-manganese-cobalt-lithium (NMC-811), lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) or lithium-iron-manganese-phosphate (LFMP) constructions.
To mitigate these impacts, the authors emphasize the importance of moving towards more sustainable lithium mining practices. In particular, the report shows that switching to brine and geothermal lithium sources could reduce the global warming potential by about 45% compared to traditional mining methods that extract the metal from rocks.
While widespread commercialization is likely still a few years away, the race to market for SSB tech has never been hotter. Among Californian EV startups, Vinfast says it’s targeting 2024, while their competitor Mullen Automotive has said SSBs may show up in their EVs by 2025. . San Jose-based QuantumScape, one of the largest names in the field, expects to deliver full scale prototypes to its partner Volkswagen on roughly the same timeline. Toyota is working in-house on a competitor, and Colorado-based Solid Power is still in the mix with backing from BMW and Ford.
How it all shakes out is anyone’s guess. From an investor’s perspective, the correct guess could potentially be worth billions. It could be even more valuable to the health of the planet.
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Here's What To Expect At LA Tech Week
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
LA Tech Week—a weeklong showcase of the region’s growing startup ecosystem—is coming this August.
The seven-day series of events, from Aug. 15 through Aug. 21, is a chance for the Los Angeles startup community to network, share insights and pitch themselves to investors. It comes a year after hundreds of people gathered for a similar event that allowed the L.A. tech community—often in the shadow of Silicon Valley—to flex its muscles.
From fireside chats with prominent founders to a panel on aerospace, here are some highlights from the roughly 30 events happening during LA Tech Week, including one hosted by dot.LA.
DoorDash’s Founding Story: Stanley Tang, a cofounder and chief product officer of delivery giant DoorDash, speaks with Pear VC's founding managing partner, Pejman Nozad. They'll discuss how to grow a tech company from seed stage all the way to an initial public offering. Aug. 19 at 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. in Santa Monica.
The Founders Guide to LA: A presentation from dot.LA cofounder and executive chairman Spencer Rascoff, who co-founded Zillow and served as the real estate marketplace firm’s CEO. Aug. 16 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Brentwood.
Time To Build: Los Angeles: Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) hosts a discussion on how L.A. can maintain its momentum as one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in the U.S. Featured speakers include a16z general partners Connie Chan and Andrew Chen, as well as Grant Lafontaine, the cofounder and CEO of shopping marketplace Whatnot. Aug. 19 from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. in Santa Monica.
How to Build Successful Startups in Difficult Industries: Leaders from Southern California’s healthcare and aerospace startups gather for panels and networking opportunities. Hosted by TechStars, the event includes speakers from the U.S. Space Force, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Applied VR and University of California Irvine. Aug. 15 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. in Culver City.
LA Tech Week Demo Day: Early stage startups from the L.A. area pitch a panel of judges including a16z’s Andrew Chen and Nikita Bier, who co-founded the Facebook-acquired social media app tbh. Inside a room of 100 tech leaders in a Beverly Hills mansion, the pitch contest is run by demo day events platform Stonks and live-in accelerator Launch House. Aug. 17 from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. in Beverly Hills.
Registration information and a full list of LA Tech Week events can be found here.
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.