Social Monitoring for Public Health

Preface.- Acknowledgments.- A New Source of Big Data.- Public Health: A Primer.- Social Data.- Methods of Monitoring.- Public Health Applications.- Limitations and Concerns.- Looking Ahead.- Bibliography.- Authors' Biographies.

Michael J. Paul is an assistant professor in Information Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He develops data science techniques for analyzing and organizing large text datasets, used for applications in health science and computational epidemiology. His work was among the first to identify the broad set of health issues that can be studied in Twitter, and his research has advanced the state of the art in influenza surveillance on multiple occasions. He is a former Twitter intern, and his work with Mark Dredze was featured in a video as part of the Twitter Stories series. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2015. See his website for more information: http://www.michaeljpaul.comMark Dredze is an associate professor in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing, the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, and the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare. His work focuses on developing machine learning models for natural language processing (NLP) applications. He has pioneered new applications of these technologies in public health informatics, including work with social media data, biomedical articles, and clinical texts. His work is regularly covered by major media outlets, including NPR, The New York Times, and CNN. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. See his website for more information: http://www.dredze.com