Principle Investigator: Professor Chris Hankin
Department / Centre: Institute for Security Science and Technology
Collaborators: Dstl
Funding Agency: US Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)

Summary:

Interest in real-time syndromic surveillance based on social media data has greatly increased in recent years. The ability to detect disease outbreaks earlier than traditional methods would be highly useful for public health officials.

We developed a software system which is built upon recent developments in machine learning and data processing to achieve this goal. The system is built from reusable modules integrated into data processing pipelines that are easily deployable and configurable. It applies deep learning to the problem of classifying health-related tweets and is able to do so with high accuracy. It has the capability to detect illness outbreaks from Twitter data and then to build up and display information about these outbreaks, including relevant news articles, to provide situational awareness. It also provides nowcasting functionality of current disease levels from previous clinical data combined with Twitter data.