ShareTrace: Contact Tracing with the Actor Model
IEEE HealthCom 2022
Ryan Tatton, Erman Ayday, Youngjin Yoo, Anisa Halimi
Proximity-based contact tracing relies on user-device interaction to estimate the spread of disease. ShareTrace is one such approach that improves the efficacy of tracking disease spread by considering direct and indirect forms of contact. For their paper, which will be published in the IEEE Health Com 2022 at the IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application, and Services, Tatton, Ayday, Yoo, and Halimi utilized the actor model to provide an efficient and scalable formulation of ShareTrace with asynchronous, concurrent message passing on a temporal contact network. They also introduced message reachability (MR), an extension of temporal reachability that accounts for network topology and message-passing semantics. The evaluation on both synthetic and real-world temporal contact networks indicates that correct parameter values optimize for algorithmic accuracy and efficiency. In addition, they demonstrated that MR can accurately estimate a user's infection risk on their contacts.