Opportunities from Social Media Data for Public Health
257 views · Published 21 June 2016 · 1:02:13 · Indexed 6 November 2026
Channel: Microsoft Research · 2016 · Science & Technology
Twitter and other social media sites contain a wealth of information about populations and has been used to track sentiment towards products, measure political attitudes, and study social linguistics. In this talk, we investigate the potential for Twitter and social media to impact public health research. Broadly, we explore a range of applications for which social media may hold relevant data, including disease surveillance, public safety, and drug usage patterns. To uncover these trends, we develop new statistical models that can reveal trends and patterns of interest to public health from vast quantities of data. Our results suggest that social media has broad applicability for public health research.
