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.

Biography
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, large-scale 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.