The Land of My Consciousness

Latin American Studie

Academic Support, A Learning Brief

The K-12 Student Success: Out-of-School Time Initiative is focused on boosting student success among Oregon's middle school students. The Oregon Community Foundation and The Ford Family Foundation are currently funding 21 organizations that provide out-of-school-time programming (e.g., after school or summer) to rural students, students of color and low-income students. Funded programs emphasize academic support, positive adult role models and family engagement. This learning brief summarizes what is known about the importance of academic support from existing research and shares what we are learning about the efforts of the Initiative grantees to provide academic support through out-of-school time programming. We hope that this description of the work of the Initiative grantees helps build understanding of the practices and experiences of out-of-school time programs in Oregon.

Cost-Optimal Switching Protection Strategy in Adaptive Networks

In this paper, we study a model of network adaptation mechanism to control spreading processes over switching contact networks, called adaptive susceptible-infected-susceptible model. The edges in the network model are randomly removed or added depending on the risk of spread through them. By analyzing the joint evolution of the spreading dynamics "in the network" and the structural dynamics "of the network", we derive conditions on the adaptation law to control the dynamics of the spread in the resulting switching network. In contrast with the results in the literature, we allow the initial topology of the network to be an arbitrary graph. Furthermore, assuming there is a cost associated to switching edges in the network, we propose an optimization framework to find the cost-optimal network adaptation law, i.e., the cost-optimal edge switching probabilities. Under certain conditions on the switching costs, we show that the optimal adaptation law can be found using convex optimization. We illustrate our results with numerical simulations

Second-Order Moment-Closure for Tighter Epidemic Thresholds

In this paper, we study the dynamics of contagious spreading processes taking place in complex contact networks. We specifically present a lower-bound on the decay rate of the number of nodes infected by a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) stochastic spreading process. A precise quantification of this decay rate is crucial for designing efficient strategies to contain epidemic outbreaks. However, existing lower-bounds on the decay rate based on first-order mean-field approximations are often accompanied by a large error resulting in inefficient containment strategies. To overcome this deficiency, we derive a lower-bound based on a second-order moment-closure of the stochastic SIS processes. The proposed second-order bound is theoretically guaranteed to be tighter than existing first-order bounds. We also present various numerical simulations to illustrate how our lower-bound drastically improves the performance of existing first-order lower-bounds in practical scenarios, resulting in more efficient strategies for epidemic containment

Worst-Case Scenarios for Greedy, Centrality-Based Network Protection Strategies

The task of allocating preventative resources to a computer network in order to protect against the spread of viruses is addressed. Virus spreading dynamics are described by a linearized SIS model and protection is framed by an optimization problem which maximizes the rate at which a virus in the network is contained given finite resources. One approach to problems of this type involve greedy heuristics which allocate all resources to the nodes with large centrality measures. We address the worst case performance of such greedy algorithms be constructing networks for which these greedy allocations are arbitrarily inefficient. An example application is presented in which such a worst case network might arise naturally and our results are verified numerically by leveraging recent results which allow the exact optimal solution to be computed via geometric programming

Disease spread over randomly switched large-scale networks

In this paper we study disease spread over a randomly switched network, which is modeled by a stochastic switched differential equation based on the so called $N$-intertwined model for disease spread over static networks. Assuming that all the edges of the network are independently switched, we present sufficient conditions for the convergence of infection probability to zero. Though the stability theory for switched linear systems can naively derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence, the condition cannot be used for large-scale networks because, for a network with $n$ agents, it requires computing the maximum real eigenvalue of a matrix of size exponential in $n$. On the other hand, our conditions that are based also on the spectral theory of random matrices can be checked by computing the maximum real eigenvalue of a matrix of size exactly $n$