How to Use Twitter Friends As Sensors to Detect Disease Outbreaks | A New Society, a new education! | Scoop.it

There is intense interest in studying the way information flows through the Twitter network and how this information can be used to measure and even predict public opinion or disease outbreaks. But all this work shares a common problem: the sheer volume of data that Twitter generates. It’s simply not possible to follow what everybody is doing all the time. New research suggests there’s a better way to track the spread of information on Twitter that is much more powerful.

 

Research paper:

"Using Friends as Sensors to Detect Global-Scale Contagious Outbreaks"

http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6512


Via Cesar Sanchez, Marthèlize Tredoux