Communications of the ACM
How Twitter Could Better Predict Disease Outbreaks
A growing body of literature suggests that the data people make public on the Web can be used to track epidemics, predict box office hits and foretell other aspects of the future. Adding to this evidence, Vasileios Lampos, Tijl De Bie and Nello Cristianini of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the University of Bristol (UK) have released a paper about the utility of Twitter for tracking flu outbreaks.
The work builds on research pioneered in 2008 by scientists at Google that resulted in Google.org's Flu Trends. (To see it in action, check out today's elevated Flu incidence in South Africa.)
What's different about tapping social media instead of search queries, says senior author Nello Cristianini, is that individual tweets are qualitatively different from search strings, which tend to be quite short.
From Technology Review
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