Singapore kicked off a global rush to develop contact tracing apps for the novel coronavirus when the city-state launched an apparently new system in March, but the project actually drew inspiration from a 2014 US high school project that won an international prize, but found no backers — until now.
It all started when Rohan Suri created an app at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, to tell his mom to leave home for the bus stop when he was seven minutes away.
As the Ebola epidemic ravaged western Africa at the time, Suri and schoolmate Claire Scoggins connected the dots between tracking apps and contact tracers who ask patients whom they may have spread viruses to.
“I got really interested in basically automating a lot of these contact tracing efforts,” Suri said, citing a staff shortage in parts of Africa during the Ebola epidemic.
When Suri and Scoggins developed a prototype called kTrace, they appealed to medical aid organizations and the US government to bring it to the front lines.
However, they found no takers, even after winning third place for systems software at the 2015 International Science and Engineering Fair.
The app languished until Suri, now a 21-year-old junior at Stanford University, got an e-mail on Jan. 24 from Jason Bay, a Stanford alum and senior director at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech).
“My mom had texted me saying: ‘You’ve got to look at this virus in Wuhan and do something about it,’” Suri said. “I didn’t take it seriously, though, and week later the Singapore government is reaching out.”
Bay’s team had been looking for technology to help curb the spread of COVID-19 and came across kTrace online.
Suri spent February and March volunteering on GovTech’s TraceTogether app, alongside fellow Stanford students Nikhil Cheerla and Daniel Lee.
They said they gave Singapore a roadmap by sharing kTrace’s code and providing advice in virtual meetings on stronger privacy protections.
Singapore was “just looking around for any way to speed up the development process and we fit in,” Cheerla said.
The agency said that it contacted Suri “to understand his experiences and considerations in designing kTrace for Android.”
However, Suri “did not commit code to TraceTogether, nor did [GovTech] use kTrace in the development of TraceTogether,” it said.
University scientists Kate Farrahi and Manuel Cebrian said their studies as early as 2011 were the first to show Bluetooth readings could aid contact tracing, but they did not develop an app, and Suri had not seen their work in high school.
Since Singapore’s app launched, several dozen governments, including Australia, Britain and US states such as North Dakota, have spent millions of dollars among them to develop separate tracing apps.
Many other governments are monitoring progress in Singapore, where about 25 percent of its 5.6 million residents have downloaded TraceTogether.
Contact tracing apps aim to slow the spread of viruses by identifying secondhand infections more quickly than through interviews, but privacy concerns are a hurdle, and the technology does not work well on iPhones.
Singapore has adopted a costly solution: Giving residents small tracing gadgets that do not require smartphones.
Suri said he, too, had developed a wearable device in high school, because Ebola infections were highest in countries with low smartphone ownership.
Suri is now focusing on a third app called Zero, aimed at US cities.
The day after TraceTogether launched, a friend who knew about Suri’s involvement introduced him to some New York entrepreneurs and venture capitalists seeking to bring similar technology to the US.
They ended up cofounding Zero, which aims to attract users by bundling contact tracing technology with a safety-rating tool for shops and restaurants.
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
In the week before his fatal shooting, right-wing US political activist Charlie Kirk cheered the boom of conservative young men in South Korea and warned about a “globalist menace” in Tokyo on his first speaking tour of Asia. Kirk, 31, who helped amplify US President Donald Trump’s agenda to young voters with often inflammatory rhetoric focused on issues such as gender and immigration, was shot in the neck on Wednesday at a speaking event at a Utah university. In Seoul on Friday last week, he spoke about how he “brought Trump to victory,” while addressing Build Up Korea 2025, a conservative conference
DEADLOCK: Putin has vowed to continue fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, while talks have been paused with no immediate results expected, the Kremlin said Russia on Friday said that peace talks with Kyiv were on “pause” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wanted to capture the whole of Ukraine. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was running out of patience with Putin, and the NATO alliance said it would bolster its eastern front after Russian drones were shot down in Polish airspace this week. The latest blow to faltering diplomacy came as Russia’s army staged major military drills with its key ally Belarus. Despite Trump forcing the warring sides to hold direct talks and hosting Putin in Alaska, there
North Korea has executed people for watching or distributing foreign television shows, including popular South Korean dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms, a UN human rights report said on Friday. Surveillance has grown more pervasive since 2014 with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher — including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said. The curbs make North Korea the most restrictive country in the world, said the 14-page UN report, which was based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had
RSS