April 15, 2020

New Algorithmic Strategies to Forecasting Contagions

Abstract Can tweets be really used to track and forecast an epidemic outbreak? Can we monitor a handful of individuals in a city or a social network to forecast virality? The problems we focus on occur in diverse areas: social networks, public health surveillance, and cybersecurity. This talk will comprise two parts. In the first part, we leverage graphical models to infer the progression of the flu from user tweets. We show how we can effectively and accurately track flu trends and peaks using millions of tweets harvested from Latin America. In the second part, we design social network sensors for early detection…