key: cord-0616987-6k04q06x authors: Zhang, Cheng; Pan, Yunze; Zhang, Yunqi; Champion, Adam C.; Shen, Zhaohui; Xuan, Dong; Lin, Zhiqiang; Shroff, Ness B. title: WLAN-Log-Based Superspreader Detection in the COVID-19 Pandemic date: 2021-02-22 journal: nan DOI: nan sha: 598909691fd38fadcc4dceb9cf86eb0bfb9ebc87 doc_id: 616987 cord_uid: 6k04q06x Identifying"superspreaders"of disease is a pressing concern for society during pandemics such as COVID-19. Superspreaders represent a group of people who have much more social contacts than others. The widespread deployment of WLAN infrastructure enables non-invasive contact tracing via people's ubiquitous mobile devices. This technology offers promise for detecting superspreaders. In this paper, we propose a general framework for WLAN-log-based superspreader detection. In our framework, we first use WLAN logs to construct contact graphs by jointly considering human symmetric and asymmetric interactions. Next, we adopt three vertex centrality measurements over the contact graphs to generate three groups of superspreader candidates. Finally, we leverage SEIR simulation to determine groups of superspreaders among these candidates, who are the most critical individuals for the spread of disease based on the simulation results. We have implemented our framework and evaluate it over a WLAN dataset with 41 million log entries from a large-scale university. Our evaluation shows superspreaders exist on university campuses. They change over the first few weeks of a semester, but stabilize throughout the rest of the term. The data also demonstrate that both symmetric and asymmetric contact tracing can discover superspreaders, but the latter performs better with daily contact graphs. Further, the evaluation shows no consistent differences among three vertex centrality measures for long-term (i.e., weekly) contact graphs, which necessitates the inclusion of SEIR simulation in our framework. We believe our proposed framework and these results may provide timely guidance for public health administrators regarding effective testing, intervention, and vaccination policies. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many communities worldwide. The presence of the novel coronavirus (that causes in a community with high population density, such as a large public university, significantly increases the risk of contracting the disease. To fight COVID-19, contact tracing [8, 12, 17, 26, 27] is especially important to discover active individuals, known as superspreaders, 1 who lead to numerous COVID-19 transmission cases. Tracing human contacts to understand superspreader events is vital for preventing the spread of disease in communities such as university campuses, and such tracing has thus attracted a flurry of research interest [20, 30, 35, 37] . Typically, contact tracing is conducted manually [7] (e.g., through questionnaires and interviews), initially collecting necessary information from infected patients (such as locations they visited and people with whom they had contact). Unfortunately, manual contact tracing can result in inaccurate results due to people's unreliable memories and long delays. Hence, to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have developed numerous (partially) automated contact tracing systems. Recent efforts can be divided into two categories: client-based and infrastructure-based. Client-based approaches require pervasive deployment of apps on people's mobile devices. Client-side apps leverage a wide variety of sources to track "encounters," including records of credit card transactions [24] , cryptographic tokens exchanged via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) [2, 22, 29, 33] , or acoustic channels [20] . In contrast, infrastructure-based methods exploit existing infrastructure deployed worldwide, such as CCTV footage [28] , locations measured using cellular networks [3] , Wi-Fi hotspots [30] , and GPS [4] , without requiring client-side involvement. In this context, our paper presents an approach leveraging Wi-Fi local area network (WLAN) logs to identify potential superspreaders on the campus of a large public university. However, leveraging WLAN logs for superspreader detection is nontrivial, with two major issues. First, conventional WLAN-based solutions (e.g., WiFiTrace [30] ) infer whether students have contacted with each other based on their associations with specific access points (APs) during certain time intervals (e.g., > 15 minutes). Such symmetric contact detection neglects an important fact: the virus carried by people who have tested positive may infect others and replicate via pathogens in the environment. Therefore, others may be infected even if they linger in the environment over very short periods of time (e.g., < 15 minutes). Obviously, the current definition of human contact cannot handle this scenario. Second, existing Wi-Fi-based methods [30] quantify a superspreader by the number of associated devices from the same access point. However, the number of contacts may be unable to truly reflect how critical an individual is to spreading disease amidst the population. For example, previous work on vertex centrality measurement for social network analysis [18] demonstrates that the "importance" of a specific vertex in message-passing not only depends on the number of connected vertices, but is relevant to the vertex's location in social networks. Moreover, ground truth remains unknown in WLAN-based contact graphs, making it hard to understand how fast the disease propagates and progresses in order to determine superspreaders. To tackle the first issue, we introduce asymmetric contact, a new type of human contact. Two persons in asymmetric contact are not necessarily associated with specific APs for the same period. For example, assume Persons A and B are in asymmetric contact. Person A may stay with one specific AP for a short time (e.g., 5 minutes) whereas Person B stays longer (50 minutes). Due to Person B's longer stay time, he generates a much stronger "environment" with his microbes than Person A does. If B tests positive, he may infect A even if the latter's stay time is only 5 minutes. On the other hand, A will not infect B due to her Figure 1 : Campus buildings with AP deployment information (shaded). Other buildings include: 22 E. 16th Avenue, 53 W. 11th Avenue, Knight House, North Commons, Northwood-High Building, Raney Commons, Riverwatch Tower, and the Wexner Center for the Arts (not shown). We generate the map using Mapzen [21] with OpenStreetMap data [23] . short stay. Hence the contact between these two persons is asymmetric. When we count the contact number, B's contact with A is counted, but A's contact with B is not. The concept of asymmetric contact partially captures the notion of environmental infection 2 [11] . As to the second issue, ideally, we can choose a vertex measure to determine superspreaders using either analytical solutions or prior experimental tests. Unfortunately, due to the diversity of contact graphs and the complexity of virus propagation, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to do so. In this paper, we propose an empirical approach. We include SEIR simulation, a necessary component in our solution, to ultimately determine superspreaders among the vertex-measure outputs. Specifically, we use the SEIR model to simulate the spread of the virus, followed by adaptive interventions on groups of superspreaders identified via different measures. We then finalize superspreaders who have the most crucial virus spread impacts, over the given contact graph, according to the simulations. Incorporating the above two ideas, we propose a general framework for WLAN-log-based superspreader detection, which includes three key steps. First, we extract the individual's trajectory from wireless local area network (WLAN) logs to construct contact graphs, where vertices correspond to individual students and edges indicate physical contacts. In particular, we include both symmetric and asymmetric contact tracing to reveal potential directional interactions. Second, we adopt three vertex centrality measurements to identify three groups of potential superspreaders given a contact graph. Finally, we leverage the SEIR model to compare different vertex centrality measures and determine superspreaders based on simulation results. The WLAN dataset [6] used in this paper contains over 5,000 students at a large public university, which represents a random sample of the overall student body. Over 8,000 APs are deployed among more than 200 buildings on campus, including lecture halls, dormitories, and restaurants. There are over 41 million device (dis)associations with WLAN APs at the university over a 139-day observation period in 2015. Although insufficient WLAN logs are available in the year 2020 due to school closures by COVID-19, the patterns of students' mobility in 2015 share similarities to those in the years afterward. Figure 1 shows the locations of APs in multiple buildings on campus. Since the whole campus spans over 1,500 acres, our findings should complement mobility patterns in a large community. The main findings of this work include the following: (1) We find that there is a group of students that is critical in spreading the virus throughout the university's social contact networks. (2) We show the importance of symmetric and asymmetric contact tracing in superspreader detection. Specifically, we show that asymmetric contact tracing helps to discover hidden superspreaders in daily contact graphs and proper interventions with identified superspreaders greatly boosts efforts to contain the spread of disease. (3) We find that simple betweenness centrality better reveals the most critical individuals in daily contact graphs. We do not observe notable differences between vertex centrality measures in longer-term (i.e., weekly) contact graphs with epidemic control. (4) For resource-constrained quarantine, we observe that increasing the percentage of the quarantined individuals to over 20% of the population yields limited extra benefits. (5) We find that superspreaders change heavily over the first few weeks, then remain stable during the rest of the semester. The similarity of superspreaders between the first 20 weeks and 15 weeks is around 0.8 using the rank-biased overlap metric [34] , opening up opportunities to discover superspreaders as early as possible for efficient pandemic mitigation. Practical significance for university/city administrators: We believe our proposed contact tracing method will enable both proactive and reactive interventions. For the former, our method can help administrators rapidly identify superspreaders for health warnings and frequent testing, using data from just the first few weeks of the semester. For the latter, our method can assist efforts in contact tracing, quarantine, medical support, and prioritized patient care. In summary, our main contributions are threefold: • We propose a general framework for WLAN-log-based contact analysis and superspreader detection. The framework applies to a wide range of working scenarios based on users' preferences, environmental dynamics, and resource availability. • We present a set of initial work using the WLAN-log-based superspreader detection framework, including asymmetric contact tracing, vertex centrality measurement, and simulation-based superspreader determination. • We implement the framework and evaluate it on a large-scale real-world WLAN log dataset. Our empirical results show the efficacy of the proposed contact tracing approaches and uncover insightful findings for public health administrators. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides background on epidemic models. Section 3 presents our framework on WLAN-log-based superspreader detection. Section 4 illustrates our evaluation results and analyses. Section 5 reviews related work. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper. S E I R Figure 2 : Illustration of the popular SEIR compartmental model in epidemiology. The population is assigned to one of several labeled compartments: Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, or Recovered. The order of the labels usually shows flow patterns between the compartments with epidemiological parameters β, σ, and γ. Details are explained in the text. In this section, we discuss the background of compartmental epidemic models, which are simplified mathematical models of infectious diseases [1, 13, 14, 15, 32] . Recently, the SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered) model has shown promise combating COVID-19 in disease modeling [9, 25] , forecasting [5, 31] , and intervention [19] . In the SEIR model, the population is assigned to labeled compartments between which people move based on their health status. Following the equivalent compartmental diagram shown in Figure 2 , we can use the following differential equations to describe the SEIR model involving variables S, E, I, and R and their rates of change with respect to time t: where β is the probability of transmitting disease between a susceptible and an infectious individual, σ is the inverse of the average incubation time (the rate of latent individuals becoming infectious), and γ is the recovery rate. In this model, recovered individuals are permanently immune to disease. In practice, all parameters are constant values that can be obtained via maximum likelihood estimation with real pandemic data. In this work, we leverage SEIR simulations [25] to model quarantine (self-isolation) of identified superspreaders (cf. subsection 4.1). Figure 3 shows an overall framework of our WLAN-log-based superspreader detection. We describe each component as follows. The WLAN logs often include the (dis)association of mobile devices with respect to APs. In this paper, we use the same dataset in [6] . A sample log entry has the following format: timestamp,process,ap-name,student-id,role,MAC,SSID,result The fields in the log represent the event's UNIX timestamp, the process that generated the log entry, the AP name, the encrypted student ID, the role assigned to the device, the anonymized MAC address (preserving the OUI), the SSID name, and the authentication result (success or failure), respectively. Our WLAN dataset collection consists of three steps: (1) We first filter out students who use the university's unsecured WLAN from the dataset. Some information is missing regarding student ID and AP's name. We consider these log entries invalid in this work. After removing invalid entries from the dataset, 39 million log entries remain. (2) Since WLAN logs only provide the association (arrival) time of the person at First, we extract contact graphs from WLAN logs via symmetric and asymmetric contact tracing. Second, we perform vertex centrality measurement to discover potential superspreaders. Finally, we simulate adaptive interventions using the SEIR model. the corresponding AP, we need to estimate the disassociation (leave) time. We first sort the log entries of each student in ascending order (based on timestamps) to ensure sequential order. For APs within the same building, the stay time of each AP is the duration between the arrival time of the next AP and the current one. Following [6] , we also calculate the estimated walking time between two buildings using the Google Maps API [10] . (3) In [6] , the location granularity is building-level as that work focuses on human mobility measurement [16] . In contrast, we treat the AP as the base unit in the trajectory in order to study human proximity tracing. Therefore, after data processing, each user/MAC's trajectory becomes a time series of APs and their corresponding stay times. A person's trajectory T can be defined as: where AP i is the ith AP in trajectory T , t i is the arrival time of the person at AP i , and ST i is the stay time of the person at AP i . We refer to (AP i , t i , ST i ) as a tracklet. Figure 4 (top) shows how we estimate stay time for intra-and inter-building AP connections for a person's trajectory and illustrate Bob's trajectory between two buildings. Next, we describe the contact tracing method using persons' trajectories. Given a student's trajectory T with sequential tracklets, we take each tracklet as a query and apply beam search on all other students' tracklets to determine if there is an overlapping duration for physical interaction between two persons. Figure 4 shows an example where we consider two contact tracing methods-symmetric and asymmetric-to compute the overlapping duration between Bob and two other persons, Alice and Trudy. Symmetric contact tracing. Intuitively, if Bob and Alice connect to the same AP with a certain overlapping period, we assume there may be a potential physical interaction between them. Thus, given a tracklet (AP q , t q , ST q ) from student q (e.g., Bob) and a tracklet (AP p , t p , ST p ) from student p (e.g., Alice), we assign There is a symmetric contact (blue) between Bob and Alice and an asymmetric contact (green) between Bob and Trudy. a bidirectional 3 contact edge between q and p if AP q = AP p and the following criterion is satisfied: where d sym is a constant value of symmetric contact duration. Empirically, we set d sym to 15 minutes in the experiments. Asymmetric contact tracing. However, the above symmetric tracing method omits environmental infection (cf. section 1). In that situation, Bob may stay at AP 2 for a long enough period, making the environment infected. Thus, the virus will spread to another person, Trudy, even though the overlapping contact duration is short. To resolve this problem, we propose a new asymmetric contact tracing method that can discover such directional interactions. Concretely, we take Bob's tracklet whose stay time ST q exceeds a certain duration d env and assign a directional 4 contact edge between q (e.g., Bob) and p (e.g., Trudy) if AP q = AP p and the following criterion is satisfied: where d env and d asym are constant values of environmental infection time and asymmetric contact duration, respectively. Empirically, we set d env to 50 minutes and d asym to 5 minutes in the experiments. Contact graph with asymmetric tracing: we observe that filled red nodes are included if directional contact is considered. (c) Merging symmetric and asymmetric graphs to construct a hybrid graph: red nodes and edges indicate newly discovered information compared to the symmetric contact graph. Graph Merging. Once both symmetric and asymmetric contact graphs are obtained, we merge two graphs into one hybrid graph by aligning nodes and edges. The hybrid graph can reveal realistic contacts in our social interactions evidenced by WLAN logs. Figure 5 gives an example for each graph. The reader may ask a key question about a vertex in the hybrid graph: How "important" is a specific person in the spread of disease? Centrality measurements [18] are designed to quantify a person's importance, helping answer this question. Accordingly, the purpose of this subsection is not to propose a new metric for vertex measurement. Rather, we investigate the efficacy of three metrics in representing superspreaders in the Wi-Fi-based contact graphs. Figure 6 shows their differences. Degree centrality. Degree centrality is defined as the number of edges incident upon a vertex (i.e., the vertex's number of social ties). If the network is directed, then two separate measures of degree centrality are defined: in-degree and out-degree. In this paper, we define each vertex's out-degree as follows: where |E o u | is the total number of edges directed out of a vertex u in a directed hybrid contact graph, and N is the number of vertices in the graph. Closeness Centrality. One common notion of centrality is a vertex's "nearness" to many other vertices, which closeness centrality metrics aim to capture. For a given vertex, closeness centrality varies inversely with the vertex's distance of a vertex from all others. Formally, for a connected graph, this measure is defined as: where dist(u, v) denotes the geodesic (shortest-path) distance between vertices u and v. Intuitively, this measure looks at how fast information can spread from one vertex to all others. For example, a vertex that is close to many other vertices may easily transmit the disease to them. Betweenness centrality. Another popular class of centralities is based upon the perspective that "importance" relates to a vertex's position regarding paths in the graph. If we picture those paths as the routes by which communication takes place, vertices situated on many paths tend to be more critical to the communication process. Betweenness centrality metrics are aimed at summarizing the extent to which a vertex is located "between" other pairs of vertices: where σ(s, t|v) is the total number of shortest paths between s and t that pass through v and σ(s, t) = v σ(s, t|v). Vertices with high betweenness centrality are critical for maintaining graph connectivity. SEIR Measurement. Based on these centrality measures, we are able to identify potential superspreaders. Next, we perform adaptive interventions on those active nodes using SEIR simulations to measure who are the most critical individuals for the spread of disease based on the simulation results. In this section, we first describe our methodology. Next, we present our experimental results. WLAN dataset. We use the WLAN dataset from Cao et al. [6] , which contains WLAN log data with demographic information at a large public university spanning 139 days in 2015. Cao et al. [6] found that university students' mobility patterns change periodically on a weekly basis. In our study, we focus on analyzing the contact graph from a specific day of the week in the dataset. Specifically, we use the WLAN log information to compute the contact graph for each weekday from a randomly selected week in the dataset. We also report results on the contact graphs computed from a weekly period. We construct three types of contact graphs: symmetric, asymmetric, and hybrid. Evaluation metrics. Based on the SEIR model, we use the following realistic epidemiological measures to estimate the effect of different approaches: • Doubling Time (day): the time it takes for the number of cumulative infections to double. • Total Infected Fraction (%): the fraction of the total accumulated infected population during the entire epidemic. • Peak Infected Time (day): the time required to infect the largest possible population. • Peak Infected Fraction (%): the fraction of infected persons when peak infection is reached. Experimental comparison. We quarantine persons with higher centrality based on the hybrid contact graph and simulate the epidemic on the hybrid graph. We test three vertex centrality measurement methods and compare our results to the following baselines: • No quarantine: we let the virus spread naturally on the hybrid graph without intervention. • Random: we randomly quarantine a certain number of persons and simulate the epidemic on the hybrid graph. • Symmetric contact tracing (SymC): we quarantine persons with higher centrality based on the symmetric contact graph and simulate the epidemic on the hybrid graph. • Symmetric and asymmetric contact tracing (Hybrid): we quarantine persons with higher centrality based on the hybrid contact graph and simulate the epidemic on the hybrid graph. Implementation details. We follow [25] in order to simulate an epidemic using the SEIR model. We use the default SEIR parameters, as they are calculated from a real-world infectious dataset. 5 In particular, the total population size in the our experiments is 3748. We set the initial number of infected persons to 50, which we fix across all experiments. In order to achieve stable observations, We run our simulation 50 times in each group of experiments until convergence is reached. Main results on single-day contact graph. We report the main results of a single-day contact graph in Table 1 . Identifying superspreaders using a hybrid graph with asymmetric and symmetric contact tracing outperforms baseline methods substantially in terms of all centralities, justifying our motivation: symmetric and asymmetric contact tracing, which naturally reflects environmental infection, can be a valuable factor to contain the spread of disease. In addition, we find similar observations from other days of the week in the WLAN dataset. Next, we detail our analyses. Superspreaders exist on the university campus. We notice that both SymC and Hybrid significantly outperform baseline and "random quarantine," suggesting the existence of superspreaders and the importance of contact tracing to limit the spread of disease. To analyze these superspreaders' extent of spread, we conduct a simulated comparison by initializing different groups of individuals. As shown in Figure 7 , we observe that the virus carried by students with higher centrality causes a much faster spread than with randomly selected students. Further, students with higher betweenness centrality are critical to the spread. Asymmetric contact tracing is efficient. We found that asymmetric contact tracing with a simple vertex measure leads to a notable gain for all metrics. Especially for the total infected fraction (T-Inf), Hybrid is ∼1% better than symmetric contact tracing (SymC), which represents around 40 persons in our WLAN dataset. We also show the SEIR simulation curves in Figure 8 : both symmetric and asymmetric contact tracing methods significantly outperform random quarantine methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our superspreader detection framework. Betweenness centrality strongly limits the total infected population on daily contact graphs. By comparing different centrality measurements for the selection of quarantine populations, we found that betweenness centrality leads to the strongest reduction in the total infected fraction (from 42.61% to 37.41%) in the daily contact graph (cf. Table 1 ). One reason is that betweenness metrics can effectively discover vertices that sit on many paths are likely more critical to the spread process in social graphs. This verifies our observation in Figure 6 that betweenness centrality identifies a very different group of persons compared to degree centrality and closeness centrality (cf. subsection 3.3). Further, we extend the simulation on contact graphs computed over longer weekly periods. Compared to daily contact graphs, weekly graphs generated from the WLAN logs are more densely connected. We focus on betweenness centrality and Table 2 shows the results. We find that the difference between the symmetric and the hybrid graphs is marginal. This is because, in long-term contact tracing, the top superspreaders between the symmetric and hybrid graphs overlap highly, suggesting that early-stage pandemic control helps identify superspreaders who may be missed otherwise. We observe similar patterns for other weeks throughout the study period. How to perform quarantine with constrained resources? Next, we study suitable proportions of the population for intervention. We show the total infected fraction with respect to different amounts of infectious and quarantined populations. Figure 9 shows the results based on the betweenness centrality measure. We observe a clear turning point where quarantining 20% of the whole population reduces the spread of disease among all infected ratios. This suggests that increasing the quarantine percentage over 20% provides only marginal benefits. Will superspreaders change during the whole semester? To further analyze the stability of superspreaders among different periods, we compute the similarities of the identified superspreaders from any two accumulated weeks, whose results are shown in Figure 10 . In this study, we first generate the contact graphs based on the first N weeks in the WLAN dataset, where N ranges from 1 to 20. Next, we select the top 100 students Figure 9 : Effect of infected population in the spread of the pandemic. We show the fraction of total infected in terms of fractions of initial infected and quarantined people. based on our centrality measurements. We adopt rank-biased overlap (RBO) [34] to compute the similarity of two ranked student lists from any two accumulated weeks. Our results show that the superspreaders change during the first few weeks, but remain stable throughout the rest of the semester. For example, the similarity between the first 20 weeks and 15 weeks is around 0.8, opening up opportunities to discover the superspreaders as early as possible for efficient pandemic mitigation. Researchers have devoted considerable attention to mobile application (app) technology for COVID-19 contact tracing. For example, Covid Watch [33] uses Bluetooth signals to detect when users are near each other and alerts them anonymously if they were in contact with someone who is later diagnosed with COVID-19. Similarly, PACT [29] uses inter-phone Bluetooth communications (including energy measurements) as a proxy for inter-person distance measurement. Through applied cryptography, this system can collect and maintain weeks of contact events. Later, PACT augments these events with infection notifications leading to exposure notifications to all mobile phone owners who have had medically significant contact (in terms of distance and time) with infected people in the past medically significant period (e.g., two weeks). In addition, Singapore launched the TraceTogether [22] app to boost COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. By downloading the app and consenting to participate in it, TraceTogether lets users "proactively help" in the contact tracing process [22] . The app works by exchanging short-range Bluetooth signals between phones to detect other app users who are nearby. Apple and Google [2] are working together for the first time on a protocol that will alert users if they have been exposed to the coronavirus. Luo et al. propose A-Turf [20] , an acoustic encounter detection method for COVID-19 contact tracing. Compared with Bluetooth technology, the system more precisely detects encounters within 6-foot ranges (social distancing). Unlike the WLAN-log-based contact tracing presented in this paper, client-based contact tracing requires users' widespread adoption and active participation. Infrastructure-based methods take advantage of existing infrastructure deployed worldwide such as CCTV footage [28] , locations measured using cellular networks [3] , Wi-Fi hotspots [30, 36] , and GPS [4] , without requiring client-side involvement. Similar to our approach, recent efforts [30, 36] use passive Wi-Fi sensing for network-based contact tracing for infectious diseases, particularly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. Those works mainly use location occupancy or number of contact as the measure to identify the superspreaders while we consider different types of centrality for measuring the "importance" of the vertex in the social networks. Moreover, we adopt SEIR simulation to justify which measure is better in discovering the superspearders. In this paper, we focused on WLAN-log-based superspreader detection in the COVID-19 pandemic. We proposed a general framework with applications to a wide range of working scenarios based on users' prefer-ences, environmental dynamics, and resource availability. Moreover, we presented asymmetric contact, a new type of human contact. The concept of asymmetric contact partially captured the notion of environmental infection. We required that persons in asymmetric contact must have had a certain overlap time between their association times with a specific AP. In fact, we can generalize by eliminating this constraint. We can treat the overlap time as a control knob to adjust the degree of "asymmetry". Due to space limitations, this remains part of our future work. We have implemented our framework, conducted an extensive evaluation, and obtained a set of important findings. Our proposed contact tracing framework and our findings provided a tool as well as guidelines for public health administrators regarding both proactive and reactive interventions against the pandemic. 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