Effective epidemic forecasting is critical for public health strategies and efficient medical resource allocation, especially in the face of rapidly spreading infectious diseases. However, existing deep-learning methods often overlook the dynamic nature of epidemics and fail to account for the specific mechanisms of disease transmission. In response to these challenges, we introduce an innovative end-to-end framework called Epidemiology-Aware Neural ODE with Continuous Disease Transmission Graph (EARTH) in this paper. To learn continuous and regional disease transmission patterns, we first propose EANO, which seamlessly integrates the neural ODE approach with the epidemic mechanism, considering the complex spatial spread process during epidemic evolution. Additionally, we introduce GLTG to model global infection trends and leverage these signals to guide local transmission dynamically. To accommodate both the global coherence of epidemic trends and the local nuances of epidemic transmission patterns, we build a cross-attention approach to fuse the most meaningful information for forecasting. Through the smooth synergy of both components, EARTH offers a more robust and flexible approach to understanding and predicting the spread of infectious diseases. Extensive experiments show EARTH superior performance in forecasting real-world epidemics compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/Emory-Melody/EpiLearn.

Efficient Random Access (RA) is critical for enabling reliable communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. Herein, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based distributed RA scheme, entitled Neural Network-Based Bandit (NNBB), for the IIoT alarm scenario. In such a scenario, the devices may detect a common critical event, and the goal is to ensure the alarm information is delivered successfully from at least one device. The proposed NNBB scheme is implemented at each device, where it trains itself online and establishes implicit inter-device coordination to achieve the common goal. Devices can transmit simultaneously on multiple orthogonal channels and each possible transmission pattern constitutes a possible action for the NNBB, which uses a deep neural network to determine the action. Our simulation results show that as the number of devices in the network increases, so does the performance gain of the NNBB compared to the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) RA benchmark. For instance, NNBB experiences a 7% success rate drop when there are four channels and the number of devices increases from 10 to 60, while MAB faces a 25% drop.

A researcher uses IBM's supercomputing infrastructure. Artificial intelligence has a great chance to prove its worth in the ongoing global war against the novel coronavirus. From garnering data about the pandemic to analyzing transmission patterns, providing information about prevention and diagnosing contamination, a variety of AI programs are being used to contain the virus spread and related treatments. IBM, the world's leading cloud platform and computing business, is mobilizing its AI and supercomputing capabilities to support governments' and citizens' efforts to fight the virus. The US company has launched IBM Watson Assistant for Citizens, a public cloud-based virtual assistant system aimed at helping people search information about the COVID-19, such as symptoms, testing sites as well as current status of schools, transportation and other public services.