Page History

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We had a great meeting as Bebo put it "It was a good mixture of technical brainstorming, future planning, and personal exchange."

Amity 

Amity team photo:

Apart from invitations to present papers at upcoming conferences we have not heard from Amity since June 2020. 

They then said:

• "We are still working on the portability of the app from Android to Flutter, which will enable the app to be downloaded in iOS environment along with Android. Currently our application is supported by Android only. Samaksh is looking forward to this issue. We are also discussing how the location feature will add functionalities to our application, and the PingER project will be more than just static servers and we can better monitor the internet with growing mobile communication. Shivang will mail you the list of all the proposed ideas we have on our mind, on what we can do with our mobile application. We will forward the list to Les Cottrell Sir and Bebo White Sir and get it discussed with them too."

  "One more thing I wanted to ask you is, can we have the ideas to be working on, or the subdomains, some particular topic we should pursue? Because there are a lot of facts we collected alone in the Coronavirus topic itself, and we need something more specific to work upon, like monitoring some particular countries, the government transparency on data, or measuring the impact the pandemic has on each country on global scale. Please guide us into this. It would be a great help."

At that time we sent them an analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on PingER measurements. See the full report so far (main focus is on Africa and to a lesser extent South America) is at PingER and Covid-19 by Region. At the time we suggested "A possible project for Amity might be to extend the detailed analysis to South Asia. We would be happy to assist as needed."

Concerning the Android App, Umar pointed out that we need to understand/specify the end goal of the project. The project can support mobility since it records GPS coordinates. One needs to decide how to utilize the data gathered. It can be useful for evaluating Telco service providers. Unlike today's PingER which has continuous data between monitoring stations and targets, we would expect the mobile data to be much more sparse both in terms of time and monitors (cell-phones). Further, it is community-driven rather than centrally. It would appear to be similar to Thousand Eyes or Speedtest app that enables cell phone users to make on-demand measurements of throughput from their phones to targets around the world. The measurements would be archived and can then be summarized and reports presented, e.g. comparing connectivity from area to area on maps and or by carrier. Telcos are also making such connectivity measurements for their network. An advantage of the current proposal is that it would be across service providers, and also have less network impact than say Speedtest. 

We agreed that Les would contact Amity to understand their current status, in particular with respect to the above project (e.g. who is leading the project and involved at the Amity end, the current status) and if relevant suggest setting up a Zoom meeting between the Amity folks and ourselves.

Saqib plans to continue work on PingER monitoring for remote areas, in particular in Pakistan. He will use Android PingERs. This may partially tie into the Amity project.

He will also continue his work on Blockchain and plans to attend a Blockchain workshop in Guangzhou.

Saqib plans to get 2-3 undergraduate students in a month or so and plans to look at Android PingER. No update 4/16/2020.

8/31/2020 there was an exchange of emails: Saqib wrote: I" am healthy and virus-free, however, things turned quite hectic on my end due to online lectures and assignments. Now things are getting better. I have sent a message to pinger.gcwuf.edu.pk to turn the server live again. Further, I am trying to figure out a student to look at the possible impact of Covid-19 interventions on Internet responsiveness as measured by PingER."

UMAR

Covid

Saqib plans to continue work on PingER monitoring for remote areas, in particular in Pakistan. He will use Android PingERs. This may partially tie into the Amity project.

Saqib plans to get 2-3 undergraduate students in a month or so and plans to look at Android PingER. No update 4/16/2020.

8/31/2020 there was an exchange of emails: Saqib wrote: I" am healthy and virus-free, however, things turned quite hectic on my end due to online lectures and assignments. Now things are getting better. I have sent a message to pinger.gcwuf.edu.pk to turn the server live again. Further, I am trying to figure out a student to look at the possible impact of Covid-19 interventions on Internet responsiveness as measured by PingER." 

At the meeting, Saqib clarified that the student(s) would be under-graduates, and they would be available in the next 1 to 2 months. This could be an opportunity for collaboration between the UAF team and Amity on the PingER cell phone App.

Saqib mentioned that when he installed PingER in Guangzhou there was pushback from some of the Chinese sites monitored concerning the continuous pinging. We are still monitoring about 100 targets in China.

Covid

Saqib

People do not appear to be cautious and not strictly following guidelines. Yet at the same time the 

Umar

Concerning the impact of Covid-19 on work, Umar said that compared to the old regime  of being physically at work working, or at home on personal business, compared to today's lack of boundaries where all work is at home, is quite exhausting. For example, the children are not used to parents being at home all the time, communications come during meals, there is a need to indicate when one is not available etc.How are we all doing

Les

Working on analyzing the data from Johns Hopkins University on confirmed cases. and deaths with a library of reports at https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/excel, including:

• US Politics:
  • The impact of Trump's political rallies on spreading Covid-19 
    • Also see Covid-19 US cases by counties following political rallies
  • Cases in US states: in favor of, or  leaning to, or undecided  for Trump or for Biden
  • States with Republican governors
  • States with Democratic governors
• Cases in: Europe: Central,  Northern, Western, Eastern, South-West, 
• Cases in: East Asia, Middle East, South Asia, South West Asia
• Cases in: Central America
• I will be adding South America
• US:
  • San Francisco Bay
  • Compared to Western Europe
  • US most populated states

There are instructions at Covid-19 - Visualizing the data with Excel (https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Covid-19+-+Visualizing+the+data+with+Excel)

Next Meeting

Next meeting:  There will be a Doodle poll, for  2020 at 9 pm Pacific time; a day later 9:00 am Pakistan time; 9:30 am India time; 12:00 pm Malaysian & Guangzhou time;  1:00 pm Thailand time; 6:00 am Jordan time. 5:00am Turkey time.  

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