Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly attractive to public health researchers.
Given the heightened interest in AI for public health, a group of faculty members, student members and collaborators from University of Waterloo School of Public Health Sciences have formed a collaborative research community, “Digital Intelligence for Public Health” (DI4PH) group.
Connecting students and health researchers
DI4PH connects health researchers and students in creating digital solutions to support public health initiatives; with a better understanding of digital health and the use of digital technologies across the health ecosystem.
We aim to provide a platform for faculty, researchers, and students passionate about machine learning modelling and possibly collaborate by sharing code modules and some datasets (e.g., social media data, administrative data, IoT data, etc.) to address various research questions.
DI4PH group has collaboratively learned ML algorithms, including topic modelling, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, classifications, etc. and applied these algorithms to real-world data. Thus far, we used Twitter data as the first project for sentiment and topic analyses, investigating public attitudes during the second lockdown in Canada. We are currently working on Reddit data at scale and hope to expand to other types of data and analytics in the near future.