Public Health

The proliferation of social media – such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and Web forums – has created an unprecedented, continuous stream of messages containing the thoughts, opinions, and beliefs of millions of people. Can we transform this raw data into insights about public health? Our recent work has shown promising results mining online data to monitor disease symptoms and estimate population health, suggesting that this new data source can enhance our understanding of the relationships among health, behavior, personality, and environment.

Publications


Crisis Informatics

During disasters such as hurricanes, first-responders need situational awareness to make the right decisions in a quickly changing environment. People on the ground often post online messages that provide actionable information, but it can be difficult to find among all the noise. Can we monitor social media during a natural disaster or other crisis to inform first-responders? Can we discern the most vulnerable populations based on their attitudes before, during, and after the disaster?

Publications


User Attribute Inference

Using social media to inform health and disaster relief requires knowledge of user-level attributes, such as location, age, and gender, in order to produce accurate information. Can we infer such attributes from linguistic patterns of users? If so, what are the privacy implications of this technology?

Publications


Information Extraction

Most of the world’s information is intended to be read by humans, not computers. Information extraction transforms unstructured documents into structured representation, thereby allowing knowledge discovery applications to provide insights from large text collections. We explore statistical approaches to named-entity recognition, coreference resolution, and relation extraction.

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Active Learning

Most machine learning methods require costly human annotation efforts for training and validation. Can we more efficiently train machine learning models? We explore several interactive frameworks to improve the learning rate of machine learning algorithms, particularly for structured prediction problems.

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Scalable Machine Learning

Most sophisticated structured prediction algorithms were not designed to run at Web scale. We explore accurate approximations that allow us to use rich data representations while scaling up to millions of variables.

Publications