Using Twitter to Track the Flu

Guest: Alessandro Vespignani, PhD, Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences, Northeastern University Have you ever been so miserable with the flu, complete with fever, stuffy nose, body aches, coughs that keep you up at night, that you felt like you had to tweet about it? Well if you ever have, someone may have used your tweet to track the flu in real time. And that someone could be Alessandro Vespignani, a professor of physics, computer science and health sciences at Northeastern University. He has successfully answered the CDC’s 2013 challenge to figure out how to predict the influenza season and his method involves social media, not doctors’ reports.