{"id":171192,"date":"2016-07-15T06:31:13","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T10:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=171192"},"modified":"2017-11-09T10:40:33","modified_gmt":"2017-11-09T15:40:33","slug":"10-years-later-inconsequential-tweets-boon-researchers-171192","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/10-years-later-inconsequential-tweets-boon-researchers-171192\/","title":{"rendered":"10 years later, ‘inconsequential’ tweets a boon for researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cjust setting up my twttr,\u201d social media entrepreneur Jack Dorsey typed into a website. Ten years later, Twitter is the place where much of the world \u201ctalks to itself\u201d in 140 characters or less.<\/p>\n

A July 15, 2006, news story is credited with bringing Twitter into the public’s consciousness, and since then it has become a fertile ground for researchers interested in tracking social, cultural, and political trends, including topics such as disease outbreaks, the dynamics of campaigns, and consumer preferences.<\/p>\n

Dorsey and his cofounders chose the name \u201ctwitter\u201d because it described “a short inconsequential burst of information.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, Twitter is anything but \u201cinconsequential\u201d in terms of data science research and its applications.<\/p>\n

Using machine learning, natural language processing and other data science techniques, researchers leverage Twitter\u2019s 300 million followers \u00a0and the hundreds of millions of tweets they post each day as a kind of distributed sensor network, where each person observes and reports on some aspect of the world, says Henry Kautz, the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the University of Rochester.<\/p>\n

“Each report is very noisy, but the aggregate results can be reliable,” Kautz says. “The approach can be used for health, environmental protection, public safety and many other applications.”<\/p>\n

For example, at the University of Rochester:<\/p>\n