Data driven: the uses of big data go beyond micro-targeted marketing.

AuthorChristensen, Lisa
PositionTechnology

Big data.

The term is used as a buzzword by marketers and Big Brother-fearers alike--a means of peering into the mind of the internet user with clues they may not realize they're leaving behind.

Those same breadcrumbs that hint toward terrorist activity or tell Google which products you're most likely to buy, though, are being studied and used toward improving public health and preventing child maltreatment and sexual abuse, among other beneficial uses.

"There's always this sense of 'Big Brother's watching,' like everything I say is being interpreted by a machine or something, and there's still an element of that, but were not trying to be creepy about it. We're trying to save lives and do something helpful and expand on what others are doing," says Christophe Giraude-Carrier, a professor of computer science at Brigham Young University.

Searching for clues

Giraude-Carrier has been sifting through social media to find hints of prescription drug abuse or signs of potential suicide. The idea for his studies came about after seeing the work that had been done tracking the spread of flu viruses by data mining social media platforms.

"There's been some work on tracking things like the flu on social media like Twitter, but one thing we wanted to see if we could do is track issues that were different," he says. "We wanted to focus on issues that were relevant in Utah."

Prescription drug abuse and suicide are both significant public health concerns in the Beehive State.

To see if his studies were even feasible, Giraude-Carrier and his researchers, including some from the psychology department, scoured Twitter for two to three weeks to find tweets in English from across the country that had any form of suicidal ideation in them. The tweets ranged from the overt--"I want to end my life"--to the more subtle--"I feel alone, nobody cares," or "The world would be a better place without me." The number of tweets with suicidal ideation in them was compared to suicide rates from the Center for Disease Control overall and by state.

Giraude-Carrier's hypothesis that people considering suicide would make a mention of it online was correct. The rates of social media mentions and actual rates of suicide were comparable using the CDC data.

"This suggests whatever happens online is indicative of what will happen in real life. It's a decent sort of data," he says.

Another study focused on prescription drug abuse, such as prescription pain medication and Adderall, an...

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