News Category: General

  • General Scientific American

    Computers can sense sarcasm? Yeah, right

    • August 26, 2016
    "Irony or sarcasm requires a notion of context. It is quite different from spam or even [textual] sentiment analysis," says Byron Wallace, an assistant professor at Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science. Trying to incorporate some notion of context; that's what's cool about this."
  • General NPR

    How Big, Really, Is The Zika Outbreak In Florida?

    • August 24, 2016
    "Zika is one of those diseases that is always like an iceberg — you just see the tip," says Alessandro Vespignani, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, who has been tasked with modeling the spread of the virus.
  • General DOTmed

    Technavio releases report on top three emerging trends to impact the global connected health market

    • August 19, 2016
    “The current healthcare system faces a shortage of resources. The supply of experienced medical professionals has been insufficient to meet the rapidly growing demand for medical services. The shortage of nurses is one of the major reasons for a drop in the quality of medical services. Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, US has developed the concept of a virtual nurse to overcome this,” according to Amber.
  • Olga Vitek
    General News at Northeastern

    Biological detectives use Big Data to track disease progression

    • August 8, 2016
    Just as inves­ti­ga­tors use evi­dence to recon­struct crime scenes, North­eastern data sci­en­tist Olga Vitek hunts down and ana­lyzes mol­e­c­ular changes that drive dis­eases to recon­struct their bio­log­ical “crime scenes.” The evi­dence she com­piles in her mas­sive datasets leads to ear­lier diag­noses and more effec­tive treatments.
  • Alessandro Vespignani
    General The Atlantic

    There’s probably way more zika in the United States than has been counted

    • August 4, 2016
    “CDC is doing a great job, but it is really hard to detect cases,” said Alessandro Vespignani, one of the authors of the paper. The federal agency is faced with an exceedingly difficult task, in part because it is cobbling together data from various monitoring systems in different states and jurisdictions. The nature of the virus presents additional challenges, making it more complicated to track than other epidemics. “You have to ingest much more data and deal with another level of complexity as well as other sources of uncertainties,” Vespignani said.
  • General News at Northeastern

    Vespignani & team project Zika’s growth and spread

    • August 2, 2016
    The news comes on the heels of new research by North­eastern pro­fessor Alessandro Vespig­nani that can help coun­tries in the Amer­icas plan a response. The new study, along with inter­ac­tive maps, pro­vides cur­rent num­bers as well pro­jec­tions for the number of Zika cases in the Amer­icas through Jan­uary 2017. It also pro­vides pro­jec­tions for the number of micro­cephaly cases asso­ci­ated with the dis­ease through October 2017, a date chosen to allow for the nine months of preg­nancy. Micro­cephaly is a serious neu­ro­log­ical birth defect char­ac­ter­ized by a smaller than normal head.