Tracing Influenza Epidemics via Crowdsourcing

Researchers from Google (Mountain View,CA,USA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta, GA,USA) recently reported a method to build a model that helps detecting the spread of Influenza.

The article describes the analysis of search logs in combination with records of doctor visits related to Influenza-like Illness (ILI). The goal of the model is to predict the percentage of doctor visits that are ILI-related. The authors report a correlation of up to 0.96 between the model predictions and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports.

Citation:

Jeremy Ginsberg, Matthew H. Mohebbi, Rajan S. Patel, Lynnette Brammer, Mark S. Smolinski and Larry Brilliant. Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. Nature 457, 1012-1014 (19 February 2009).

One Microsoft Way

Last week, at Redmond, Microsoft Research showcased a list of projects from its labs located worldwide during the TechFest 2009. As part of my internship last year, at the lovely Microsoft Research Cambridge - UK, I worked on the Mobile Content-Casting project, which was also showcased.

Ars Technica has an article summarizing some of the projects presented at TechFest 2009.

It is worth taking a look: Microsoft Research TechFest 2009: a glance at the road ahead.

I particularly found the SecondLight and the suite of Social-Digital demos really cool. Both are from MS Research at Cambridge - UK.