Related papers: Assessing public health interventions using Web co…
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…
Defining and identifying causal intervention effects for transmissible infectious disease outcomes is challenging because a treatment -- such as a vaccine -- given to one individual may affect the infection outcomes of others.…
Estimating influence on social media networks is an important practical and theoretical problem, especially because this new medium is widely exploited as a platform for disinformation and propaganda. This paper introduces a novel approach…
Social media data provides propitious opportunities for public health research. However, studies suggest that disparities may exist in the representation of certain populations (e.g., people of lower socioeconomic status). To quantify and…
The health effects of environmental exposures have been studied for decades, typically using standard regression models to assess exposure-outcome associations found in observational non-experimental data. We propose and illustrate a…
Causal identification of treatment effects for infectious disease outcomes in interconnected populations is challenging because infection outcomes may be transmissible to others, and treatment given to one individual may affect others'…
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…
The epidemiology has recently witnessed great advances based on computational models. Its scope and impact are getting wider thanks to the new data sources feeding analytical frameworks and models. Besides traditional variables considered…
Consider the causal effect that one individual's treatment may have on another individual's outcome when the outcome is contagious, with specific application to the effect of vaccination on an infectious disease outcome. The effect of one…
Early detection and modeling of a contagious epidemic can provide important guidance about quelling the contagion, controlling its spread, or the effective design of countermeasures. A topic of recent interest has been to design social…
Digital public health monitoring has long relied on data from major social media platforms. Twitter was once an indispensable resource for tracking disease outbreaks and public sentiment in real time. Researchers used Twitter to monitor…
Evidence for Action (E4A), a signature program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, funds investigator-initiated research on the impacts of social programs and policies on population health and health inequities. Across thousands of…
Mobile phones provide a powerful sensing platform that researchers may adopt to understand proximity interactions among people and the diffusion, through these interactions, of diseases, behaviors, and opinions. However, it remains a…
Measuring research impact is important for ranking publications in academic search engines and for research evaluation. Social media metrics or altmetrics measure the impact of scientific work based on social media activity. Altmetrics are…
The way people respond to messaging from public health organizations on social media can provide insight into public perceptions on critical health issues, especially during a global crisis such as COVID-19. It could be valuable for…
Epidemics and outbreaks present arduous challenges requiring both individual and communal efforts. Social media offer significant amounts of data that can be leveraged for bio-surveillance. They also provide a platform to quickly and…
Detecting personal health mentions on social media is essential to complement existing health surveillance systems. However, annotating data for detecting health mentions at a large scale is a challenging task. This research employs a…
Data-driven methods for mental health treatment and surveillance have become a major focus in computational science research in the last decade. However, progress in the domain, in terms of both medical understanding and system performance,…
Users rely on search engines for information in critical contexts, such as public health emergencies. Understanding how users evaluate the trustworthiness of search results is therefore essential. Research has identified rank and the…
We consider the problem of estimating social influence, the effect that a person's behavior has on the future behavior of their peers. The key challenge is that shared behavior between friends could be equally explained by influence or by…