Prof. Qutaibah Malluhi and Dr. Abdulaziz Al-Ali have been awarded a QU CD-ER 2020 research grant with their application, titled ”Qaution: Privacy-Preserving Crowdsourcing for Outbreak Management and Self Protection in Qatar”.

CD-ER funding opportunity aims at enabling researchers to take their ideas to the next step and show commercial potential. Due to the current high demand for innovative solutions because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the Concept Development Grant opened a specific edition related to the current global crisis to enable the development of innovative prototypes, processes and platforms. This call comes in support of other ORS initiatives to tackle the pandemic diseases, such as the recent QU Emergency Response Grant (ERG).

Through this project, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the KINDI Center for Computing Research are building Qaution, a mobile application that uses crowdsourced data from residents in Qatar to help track exposure to Coronavirus and manage the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Qaution complements other precautionary efforts in Qatar, such as the Ehteraz application. Qaution addresses the main concerns Qatar residents are having with Ehteraz, namely privacy and mobile battery life. The application maintains the privacy of individuals, as it only shares random rolling (continuously changing) keys with other parties. Therefore, neither other users nor the server are able to track the location of individuals. The system would still be able to alert individuals if they are in close proximity to, or have been in close contact with, persons diagnosed with COVID-19. This alerts them to take precautions, take the virus test, and/or self-quarantine to prevent the further spread of the virus. Users have full control of their private data and do not need to share any identifying information such as name, geolocation, and phone number. To avoid high battery consumption, instead of using standard Bluetooth communication, Qaution uses the emerging Bluetooth Law Energy technology. An additional outcome of this project is to produce a rich and anonymous dataset that will be made available to authorities as well as other researchers in Qatar.

Qatar University is deeply concerned about the health and safety of the nation. Due to the exceptional impact of the emergency situation, QU is committed to work with its faculty and researchers to contribute to the current research and development investigations.