Related papers: Detecting influenza outbreaks by analyzing Twitter…
For epidemics control and prevention, timely insights of potential hot spots are invaluable. Alternative to traditional epidemic surveillance, which often lags behind real time by weeks, big data from the Internet provide important…
With the pervasiveness of online media data as a source of information verifying the validity of this information is becoming even more important yet quite challenging. Rumors spread a large quantity of misinformation on microblogs. In this…
We consider the problem of detecting an epidemic in a population where individual diagnoses are extremely noisy. The motivation for this problem is the plethora of examples (influenza strains in humans, or computer viruses in smartphones,…
Microblogging platforms such as Twitter are increasingly being used in event detection. Existing approaches mainly use machine learning models and rely on event-related keywords to collect the data for model training. These approaches make…
In this work, we tackle the problem of predicting entity popularity on Twitter based on the news cycle. We apply a supervised learn- ing approach and extract four types of features: (i) signal, (ii) textual, (iii) sentiment and (iv)…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
Seasonal influenza epidemics cause consistent, considerable, widespread loss annually in terms of economic burden, morbidity, and mortality. With access to accurate and reliable forecasts of a current or upcoming influenza epidemic's…
Influenza is an acute respiratory infection caused by a virus. It is highly contagious and rapidly mutative. However, its epidemiological characteristics are conventionally collected in terms of outpatient records. In fact, the subjective…
Twitter messages (tweets) contain various types of information, which include health-related information. Analysis of health-related tweets would help us understand health conditions and concerns encountered in our daily life. In this work,…
Supervised learning algorithms are heavily reliant on annotated datasets to train machine learning models. However, the curation of the annotated datasets is laborious and time consuming due to the manual effort involved and has become a…
Influenza remains a significant burden on health systems. Effective responses rely on the timely understanding of the magnitude and the evolution of an outbreak. For monitoring purposes, data on severe cases of influenza in England are…
The unmoderated nature of social media enables the diffusion of hoaxes, which in turn jeopardises the credibility of information gathered from social media platforms. Existing research on automated detection of hoaxes has the limitation of…
Social media communications are becoming increasingly prevalent; some useful, some false, whether unwittingly or maliciously. An increasing number of rumours daily flood the social networks. Determining their veracity in an autonomous way…
Influenza viruses mutate rapidly and can pose a threat to public health, especially to those in vulnerable groups. Throughout history, influenza A viruses have caused pandemics between different species. It is important to identify the…
The role of social media in opinion formation has far-reaching implications in all spheres of society. Though social media provide platforms for expressing news and views, it is hard to control the quality of posts due to the sheer volumes…
Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommender systems play a crucial role in determining the content that users are exposed to on social media platforms. However, the behavioural patterns of these systems are often opaque, complicating…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
Background: Tools used to appraise the credibility of health information are time-consuming to apply and require context-specific expertise, limiting their use for quickly identifying and mitigating the spread of misinformation as it…
With the increasing use of online social networks as a source of news and information, the propensity for a rumor to disseminate widely and quickly poses a great concern, especially in disaster situations where users do not have enough time…
Social media has recently emerged as a premier method to disseminate information online. Through these online networks, tens of millions of individuals communicate their thoughts, personal experiences, and social ideals. We therefore…