Publications by authors named "Martin Tomko"

The aim of this study was to draw attention to the risk of transmission of Encephalitozoon, Cryptosporidium and Blastocystis infection due to high animal migration and to point out that even wild animals can be a source of many zoonotic diseases. Encephalitozoon cuniculi, Cryptosporidium spp. and Blastocystis spp.

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spp. has been reported in wildlife, domestic animals and animals housed in ZOO. To-date, 17 genetically diverse lines have been reported in mammals and birds (designated ST) based on differences in the SSU rRNA.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence has accumulated that movement restrictions enacted to combat virus spread produce disparate consequences along socioeconomic lines. We investigate the hypothesis that people engaged in financially secure employment are better able to adhere to mobility restrictions, due to occupational factors that link the capacity for flexible work arrangements to income security. We use high-resolution spatial data on household internet traffic as a surrogate for adaptation to home-based work, together with the geographical clustering of occupation types, to investigate the relationship between occupational factors and increased internet traffic during work hours under lockdown in two Australian cities.

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While tracking-data analytics can be a goldmine for institutions and companies, the inherent privacy concerns also form a legal, ethical and social minefield. We present a study that seeks to understand the extent and circumstances under which tracking-data analytics is undertaken with social licence-that is, with broad community acceptance beyond formal compliance with legal requirements. Taking a University campus environment as a case, we enquire about the social licence for Wi-Fi-based tracking-data analytics.

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Understanding human movement patterns at local, national and international scales is critical in a range of fields, including transportation, logistics and epidemiology. Data on human movement is increasingly available, and when combined with statistical models, enables predictions of movement patterns across broad regions. Movement characteristics, however, strongly depend on the scale and type of movement captured for a given study.

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Governments are instituting mobile tracking technologies to perform rapid contact tracing. However, these technologies are only effective if the public is willing to use them, implying that their perceived public health benefits must outweigh personal concerns over privacy and security. The Australian federal government recently launched the 'COVIDSafe' app, designed to anonymously register nearby contacts.

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COVID-19 is highly transmissible and containing outbreaks requires a rapid and effective response. Because infection may be spread by people who are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic, substantial undetected transmission is likely to occur before clinical cases are diagnosed. Thus, when outbreaks occur there is a need to anticipate which populations and locations are at heightened risk of exposure.

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All established models in transportation engineering that estimate the numbers of trips between origins and destinations from vehicle counts use some form of a priori knowledge of the traffic. This paper, in contrast, presents a new origin-destination flow estimation model that uses only vehicle counts observed by traffic count sensors; it requires neither historical origin-destination trip data for the estimation nor any assumed distribution of flow. This approach utilises a method of statistical origin-destination flow estimation in computer networks, and transfers the principles to the domain of road traffic by applying transport-geographic constraints in order to keep traffic embedded in physical space.

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Background: Infectious diseases spread through inherently spatial processes. Road and air traffic data have been used to model these processes at national and global scales. At metropolitan scales, however, mobility patterns are fundamentally different and less directly observable.

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