LINKING ONLINE ATTENTION TO PANDEMIC RESPONSES

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought unprecedented change and challenges to humanity. This project aims to develop a set of computational tools and metrics to measure the change in public engagement in the ongoing global pandemic. While there is recent work on mapping emergency response and identifying a narrow set of health topics in online forums, the scale and prolonged development of the current pandemic calls for comprehensive measurements of changes in different aspects of our social lives, as well as comparative analysis of the varying policies and responses world-wide. The project team will leverage our data-intensive infrastructure to curate unique longitudinal social media datasets about the pandemic. We will profile the data streams with respect to a diverse set of topics ranging from public health to the change of socioeconomic activities, such as the change of work and supply chains of essential goods. A particular focus will be put on public attitudes to epidemic control measures, and their relationships with offline surveys and polls to validate the efficacy, and predict changes in attitude across different geographies. This project also aims to establish a unique set of online metrics that will paint a real-time picture of public health status and inform the design and decision on intervention measures. The joint ANU-PITT computational social science teams will contribute to the global efforts for conquering the current and future pandemics.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Aug 11, 2021
Source ID
FA23862014065

Entities

People

  • Yu-Ru Lin

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • United States Air Force
  • University of Pittsburgh

Tags

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Educational Psychology
  • Infectious Disease/Epidemiology