Michael Paul, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science, commented recently in a news article about听the risks and benefits of using Twitter听data to track the use of e-cigarettes among youths.
Extrapolating public health data on e-cigarette use from a collection of tweets can be precarious, of course. 鈥淏ut that's not necessarily a bad thing,鈥� says Michael Paul, an assistant professor of information science at the University of Colorado, Boulder who has tracked topics like air quality, influenza and bath salts on social media. 鈥淏ecause these products are so new and government-run surveys take a few years to catch up, researchers are still trying to figure out the landscape,鈥� he said. 鈥淭here's this time lag with national surveys that the social media can fill in.鈥�
Paul's research centers around using machine learning and statistical techniques to extract data from new sources, such as social media posts.
Read the full article on e-cigarette trends on .