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Cities become mission-critical zones during pandemics and it is vital to develop a better understanding of the factors that are associated with infection levels. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many cities severely; however, there is significant variance in its impact across cities. Pandemic infection levels are associated with inherent features of cities (e.g., population size, density, mobility patterns, socioeconomic condition, and health environment), which need to be better understood. Intuitively, the infection levels are expected to be higher in big urban agglomerations, but the measurable influence of a specific urban feature is unclear. The present study examines 41 variables and their potential influence on COVID-19 cases and fatalities. The study uses a multi-method approach to study the influence of variables, classified as demographic, socioeconomic, mobility and connectivity, urban form and density, and health and environment dimensions. This study develops an index dubbed the PVI-CI for classifying the pandemic vulnerability levels of cities, grouping them into five vulnerability classes, from very high to very low. Furthermore, clustering and outlier analysis provides insights on the spatial clustering of cities with high and low vulnerability scores. This study provides strategic insights into levels of influence of key variables upon the spread of infections as well as fatalities, along with an objective ranking for the vulnerability of cities. Thus it provides critical wisdom needed for urban healthcare policy and resource management. The pandemic vulnerability index calculation method and the process present a blueprint for the development of similar indices for cities in other countries, leading to a better understanding and improved pandemic management for urban areas and post-pandemic urban planning across the world., Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures

The 5G vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication for autonomous and semi-autonomous driving utilizes the wireless technology for communication and the Millimeter Wave bands are widely implemented in this kind of vehicular network application. The main purpose of this paper is to broadcast the messages from the mmWave Base Station to vehicles at LOS (Line-of-sight) and NLOS (Non-LOS). Relay using Machine Learning (RML) algorithm is formulated to train the mmBS for identifying the blockages within its coverage area and broadcast the messages to the vehicles at NLOS using a LOS nodes as a relay. The transmission of information is faster with higher throughput and it covers a wider bandwidth which is reused, therefore when performing machine learning within the coverage area of mmBS most of the vehicles in NLOS can be benefited. A unique method of relay mechanism combined with machine learning is proposed to communicate with mobile nodes at NLOS., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, conference 7th International conference on Computer Networks and Communications (CCNET 2020), AIRCC Publishing Corporation

Investigating and classifying sentiments of social media users towards an item, situation, and system are very popular among the researchers. However, they rarely discuss the underlying socioeconomic factor associations for such sentiments. This study attempts to explore the factors associated with positive and negative sentiments of the people about reopening the economy, in the United States (US) amidst the COVID-19 global crisis. It takes into consideration the situational uncertainties (i.e., changes in work and travel pattern due to lockdown policies), economic downturn and associated trauma, and emotional factors such as depression. To understand the sentiment of the people about the reopening economy, Twitter data was collected, representing the 51 states including Washington DC of the US. State-wide socioeconomic characteristics of the people, built environment data, and the number of COVID-19 related cases were collected and integrated with Twitter data to perform the analysis. A binary logit model was used to identify the factors that influence people toward a positive or negative sentiment. The results from the logit model demonstrate that family households, people with low education levels, people in the labor force, low-income people, and people with higher house rent are more interested in reopening the economy. In contrast, households with a high number of members and high income are less interested to reopen the economy. The model can correctly classify 56.18% of the sentiments. The Pearson chi2 test indicates that overall this model has high goodness-of-fit. This study provides a clear indication to the policymakers where to allocate resources and what policy options they can undertake to improve the socioeconomic situations of the people and mitigate the impacts of pandemics in the current situation and as well as in the future.

The Coronavirus pandemic has created complex challenges and adverse circumstances. This research discovers public sentiment amidst problematic socioeconomic consequences of the lockdown, and explores ensuing four potential sentiment associated scenarios. The severity and brutality of COVID-19 have led to the development of extreme feelings, and emotional and mental healthcare challenges. This research identifies emotional consequences - the presence of extreme fear, confusion and volatile sentiments, mixed along with trust and anticipation. It is necessary to gauge dominant public sentiment trends for effective decisions and policies. This study analyzes public sentiment using Twitter Data, time-aligned to COVID-19, to identify dominant sentiment trends associated with the push to 'reopen' the economy. Present research uses textual analytics methodologies to analyze public sentiment support for two potential divergent scenarios - an early opening and a delayed opening, and consequences of each. Present research concludes on the basis of exploratory textual analytics and textual data visualization, that Tweets data from American Twitter users shows more trust sentiment support, than fear, for reopening the US economy. With additional validation, this could present a valuable time sensitive opportunity for state governments, the federal government, corporations and societal leaders to guide the nation into a successful new normal future.

Along with the Coronavirus pandemic, another crisis has manifested itself in the form of mass fear and panic phenomena, fueled by incomplete and often inaccurate information. There is therefore a tremendous need to address and better understand COVID-19's informational crisis and gauge public sentiment, so that appropriate messaging and policy decisions can be implemented. In this research article, we identify public sentiment associated with the pandemic using Coronavirus specific Tweets and R statistical software, along with its sentiment analysis packages. We demonstrate insights into the progress of fear-sentiment over time as COVID-19 approached peak levels in the United States, using descriptive textual analytics supported by necessary textual data visualizations. Furthermore, we provide a methodological overview of two essential machine learning (ML) classification methods, in the context of textual analytics, and compare their effectiveness in classifying Coronavirus Tweets of varying lengths. We observe a strong classification accuracy of 91% for short Tweets, with the Naive Bayes method. We also observe that the logistic regression classification method provides a reasonable accuracy of 74% with shorter Tweets, and both methods showed relatively weaker performance for longer Tweets. This research provides insights into Coronavirus fear sentiment progression, and outlines associated methods, implications, limitations and opportunities.

Vehicular networks, an enabling technology for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), smart cities, and autonomous driving, can deliver numerous on-board data services, e.g., road-safety, easy navigation, traffic efficiency, comfort driving, infotainment, etc. Providing satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) in vehicular networks, however, is a challenging task due to a number of limiting factors such as erroneous and congested wireless channels (due to high mobility or uncoordinated channel-access), increasingly fragmented and congested spectrum, hardware imperfections, and anticipated growth of vehicular communication devices. Therefore, it will be critical to allocate and utilize the available wireless network resources in an ultra-efficient manner. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on resource allocation schemes for the two dominant vehicular network technologies, e.g. Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) and cellular based vehicular networks. We discuss the challenges and opportunities for resource allocations in modern vehicular networks and outline a number of promising future research directions.

This paper is a quantitative analysis on packet switched network with a view to generalize load balancing and determination of appropriate routing algorithm in multipath environment. Several routing algorithms have been introduced for routing of packets from source to destination. Some of them route packets accurately with increased workload and some of them drastically cut down the workload. A few of them can find out a minimum workload deviation for both UDP and TCP packets. We simulated these approaches in a well defined simulator, analyzed and evaluated their performance. After expanding our analysis with varying weights and number of paths we found that the recently proposed routing algorithm Mixed Weighted Fair Routing (MWFR) outperforms the existing routing algorithms by reducing the routing and network overhead and saving the scarce bandwidth as well as CPU consumption for packet switching networks., Comment: 12 Pages, IJCNC Journal 2010