Awarded in Fall 2023, SC&I Associate Professor of Library and Information Science Vivek Singh has won the 2022 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society's journal IEEE Intelligent Systems by the IEEE Computer Society Publications Board for the paper "Intelligent Pandemic Surveillance via Privacy-Preserving Crowdsensing."

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Singh and his colleagues conducted research to develop a crowdsensing tool designed to collect self-reported COVID-19 symptoms, while providing privacy guarantees to the users. The tool was launched as a mobile app on Apple Store and Google Play during the COVID pandemic. Through this research Singh specifically focused on supporting the privacy needs of users when interacting with such apps.

Singh co-authored the paper with Professor Jaideep Vaidya (principal investigator), Associate Professor Periklis Papakonstantinou (co-principal investigator), and Hafiz Asif (Ph.D. student, now an alumnus) from the Rutgers Business School Newark and New Brunswick, and Stephanie Shiau (co-principal investigator), an instructor in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Rutgers School of Public Health.

“Crowdsensing means collecting contributions (in this case, COVID-19-related health symptoms) from a large number of people,” Singh said. “The team created a website and a mobile app where any person can self-report their symptoms such as a fever, cough etc. This information is  stored electronically and securely in real-time, and the data is processed to ensure privacy guarantees and an aggregated version of symptom information is shared with all users.”

While physical tests take and record people’s DNA, a process that also raises privacy issues, their solution fills a critical gap, Singh said, because “Not everybody is willing to undertake physical tests, nor are physical tests available for everyone. In fact, there have been cases of people falsifying their name and personal information even when being physically tested for COVID-19. This project has made it easier for individuals to self-report symptoms and get back aggregated feedback while not having to worry about the privacy aspect.”

Singh received funding from the NSF in May 2020 through their "RAPID" funding, which was designed to enable researchers to act quickly. In an open letter, the NSF announced that in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was inviting “researchers to use the Rapid Response Research (RAPID) funding mechanism, which allowed the NSF to receive and review proposals having a severe urgency with regard to availability of or access to data, facilities or specialized equipment as well as quick-response research on natural or anthropogenic disasters and similar unanticipated events.”

Learn more about the Library and Information Science Department at the Rutgers SC&I of Communication and Information on the website.