Computer scientist Mark Dredze and his team are on the cutting edge of a movement that has scientists mining publicly available social media data to track public health trends. Recently, Dredze’s team had great success using 140-character Twitter posts to follow the spread of flu nationally, as well as in the five boroughs of New York City.
While Dredze’s team used their own computers to collect and sort through millions of publicly available tweets, new Twitter Data Grants could change that by providing access to files, dating back to 2006, to select researchers. Such access would allow Dredze’s team to apply the methods they used to track seasonal flu to trends including crime, politics, and responses to natural disasters.