World Wide Web and Public Health Intelligence
Papers from the 2014 AAAI Workshop
Arash Shaban-Nejad, David L. Buckeridge, John S. Brownstein, Workshop Organizers
Technical Report WS-14-14
44 pp.
Electronic Version of the Technical Report (Download only): $10.00 (Special Introductory Price)
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ISBN 978-1-57735-675-2
In the tightly interconnected world of the 21st century, infectious disease pandemics remain a constant threat to global health. At the same time, noncommunicable diseases have become the main cause of global disability and death, imposing a crushing burden on societies and economies around the world. Public Health Intelligence obtained through intelligent knowledge exchange and real-time surveillance is increasingly recognized as a critical tool for promoting health, preventing disease, and triggering timely response to critical public health events such as disease outbreaks and acts of bioterrorism. This intelligence is created by increasingly sophisticated informatics platforms that collect and integrate data from multiple sources, and apply analytics to generate insights that will improve decision-making at individual and societal levels.
Driven by omnipresent threats to public health and the potential of public health intelligence, governments and researchers now collect data from many sources, and analyze these data together to estimate the incidence and prevalence of different health conditions, as well as related risk factors. Modern surveillance systems employ tools and techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor direct and indirect signals and indicators of disease to enable early, automatic detection of emerging outbreaks and other health-relevant patterns. Given the ever-increasing role of the World Wide Web as a source of data for public health surveillance, accessing, managing, and analyzing its content has brought new opportunities and challenges; particularly for nontraditional online resources such as social networks, blogs, news feed, twitter posts, and online communities due to their sheer size and dynamic structure.
This workshop includes original contributions on theory, methods, systems, and applications of data mining, machine learning, databases, natural language processing, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, semantic web, and big data analytics in web-based healthcare applications, with a focus on applications in public health.