Computer Scientists Use Twitter to Analyze Public Health Trends

October 17, 2011

According to a recent report from Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science, computer scientists at John Hopkins University are using the online social networking and microblogging service to track public health trends.

"There’s a lot of different patterns we were able to uncover,” said Mark Dredze (Johns Hopkins), “so for example we were able to track the influenza rate in the United States over time just by counting how many times people are talking about the flu.”

Watch the full report from the American Institute of Physics.