Signorini A

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its millions of users to send and read each other’s ‘tweets’, or short messages limited to 140 characters. The service has more than 190 million registered users and processes about 55 million tweets per day. Despite a high level of chatter, the Twitter stream does contain useful information, and, because tweets are often sent from handheld platforms on location, they convey more immediacy than other social networking systems.

Objective

This paper describes a system that uses Twitter to estimate influenza-like illness levels by geographic region.