Richard Wen rwen@ryerson.ca
Presentation titled "A Real-time Geo-social Media Database for Large-scale Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Research" for my second research seminar at Ryerson University.
On December 31st, 2019, an infectious disease outbreak in Wuhan, China was first reported to the WHO Country Office in China with 44 cases of patients with unknown pneumonia through January 3, 2020. By January 7, 2020, the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was identified, and cases started to appear in Thailand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea. On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) renamed 2019-nCoV to the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and declared an international public health emergency as the number of cases reached 7818 globally. By March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic with 4292 deaths of over 118,000 cases worldwide as countries were urgently advised to take aggressive action to contain the spread of the virus. Recently, over 20,000 confirmed deaths out of 462,000 cases were reported on March 26, 2020 as more people are being treated and tested for COVID-19. Many pandemics in the past did not have effective means of controlling and containing the spread of diseases due to rapid infection rates and slow delivery of information on a large-scale. Today, there are over 3.5 billion smartphone users that allow people to stay connected and up-to-date on the latest news and trends around the world. To slow the spread of COVID-19, it is crucial that not only the latest information is available in a timely manner, but also how people respond to this information. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, generates large amounts of user content that can create insights on how people around the world respond to news and policies, as well as other people. This presentation focuses on recent data engineering developments made to produce a large, analysis-ready, geo-enabled database of over 100 million tweets collected since March, 4, 2020. This database will be used for a larger COVID-19 research project focused on analyzing Geo-social media data to potentially track the effectiveness of COVID-19 counter measures.
- Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2020
- Time: 11:00 AM
- Location: Online (via Ryerson Zoom)