Events

Methods for Obtaining and Incorporating Crowdsourced Data for Improved Public Health

Lecture / Panel
 
For NYU Community

  05/09 (Friday)   11:00 am – Noon     LC 400
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Joint Seminar:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Department of Technology Management and Innovation


Methods for Obtaining and Incorporating Crowdsourced Data
for Improved Public Health


Dr. Rumi Chunara
Harvard Medical School
Boston, MA


Today, Internet and mobile connectivity have enabled a plethora of new data sources that offer unprecedented opportunities for improving the health of societies. The real-time, quantitative and geo-located data generated through these “crowdsourced” sensors can improve population-public health surveillance, which suffers from limits due to latency, high cost, inherent contributor biases and imprecise resolution. Simultaneously, the observational and informal nature of these data sources present some common and new computational and engineering challenges; data from these tools is predominately being generated directly by individuals opposed to laboratories or healthcare systems and thus is generally unstructured, unvalidated and noisy. Thus my research focuses on advancing public health by building new tools for obtaining crowdsourced data and developing computational methods that use inference, natural language processing, time series and network analyses and machine learning models to best harness these data sources. In this talk I will discuss how I have obtained data from Internet-connected sensors including social media, mobile phones and point-of-care bio-molecular diagnostics and integrated the data into epidemiological models for a variety of infectious and chronic disease settings. Going beyond assessing correlations, I will demonstrate how we can use these tools for understanding disease incidence and spatio-temporal drivers of disease and health behaviors on a local and real-time basis.


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Biosketch

Rumi Chunara is an Instructor at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on building novel information sources and computational techniques to describe and predict population-level public health issues. Dr. Chunara received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Medical engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, her S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her B.Sc. (Honors) in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. She is a recipient of the MIT Presidential Fellowship and a Caltech Merit Scholarship. She has also gained clinical experiences at hospitals in Pakistan, Kenya, and the United States.