Academics believe social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter could help predict disease outbreaks and other phenomenon in the future.
Research conducted by Bristol University’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory used information from location tagged tweets and status updates to predict flu outbreaks and rainfall by collecting keyword information related to the two subjects, and comparing their results to geographical weather information and NHS records to determine if there was a correlation.
During the several months over which the information was gathered, the academics were able to collect over 50 million geographically based tweets on which to base the study and help spot patterns relating to the two chosen subject matters.
In the future, the academics believe that information from social media could help to predict trends, disease outbreaks, and electoral voting patterns, and also gauge the scale of an event and its affect.
However only 0.00028 of the world’s 7 billion population is currently using social networks such as Twitter therefore the researchers concede that the information gleamed from such sources do have limitations and don’t cover enough of the population to give an accurate snapshot of events in specific geographical areas. Despite this, the researchers do believe that Twitter holds some value in its ability to track an event through the information shared on the network.
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