Colloquium

The Global Health Program at the SDSU Graduate School of Public Health and the Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age Center of Excellence Invites You to a Public Lecture

Mark Dredze

Title: Opportunities from Social Media Data for Public Health

Abstract:

Twitter and other social media sites contain a wealth of information about populations and has been used to track sentiment towards products, measure political attitudes, and study social linguistics. In this talk, we investigate the potential for Twitter and social media to impact public health research. Broadly, we explore a range of applications for which social media may hold relevant data, including disease surveillance, public safety, and drug usage patterns. To uncover these trends, we develop new statistical models that can reveal trends and patterns of interest to public health from vast quantities of data. Our results suggest that social media has broad applicability for public health research.

  • DATE: Monday, February 10, 2014
  • TIME: 2-4 PM
  • LOCATION: CSL-120 (Viz Center)
  • Students, Staff, Faculty, and the Public are invited

Professor Mark Dredze


Mark Dredze is an Assistant Research Professor in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and a research scientist at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. He is also affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing and the Center for Population Health Information Technology. His research in natural language processing and machine learning has focused on graphical models, semi-supervised learning, information extraction, largescale learning, and speech processing. His recent work includes health information applications, including information extraction from social media, biomedical and clinical texts. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.

http://publichealth.sdsu.edu