In this presentation, we'll explore the profound influence of social media, specifically Twitter, on shaping public health beliefs and perceptions amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The first study uses Tweets to understand how COVID-19–related health beliefs are affected in the age of social media. We delve into a dataset of over 92 million tweets to gauge health beliefs using the health belief model. Alarmingly, it reveals that both scientific and nonscientific events influence health belief trends on Twitter equivalently, amplifying the challenge of the concurrent 'infodemic'. The second research studies patterns of diverse and changing sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines, leverages deep learning to dissect sentiments from 11 million tweets, connecting these sentiments with global vaccine data. Notably, while an overall positive sentiment trend was observed, variances in sentiment patterns were identified among demographic subgroups, with a particular focus on pregnant individuals. Collectively, these studies underscore the formidable influence of social media on public health perceptions and the critical role of timely, evidence-based communication in the age of infodemics.

Speaker Information:

Dr. Yuan Luo is Chief AI Officer at Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS) and Institute for Augmented Intelligence in Medicine, and Associate Professor at Department of Preventive Medicine, at Feinberg School of Medicine in Northwestern University. Globally recognized for his leadership and significant contributions to biomedical AI, Dr. Luo has earned the prestigious titles of elected Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) and elected Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). As a pioneer in the development of multi-modal AI and data science frameworks, Dr. Luo's work focuses on understanding complex diseases and informing targeted therapies. His groundbreaking research has been featured in leading journals, including JAMA, Nature Medicine, and Nature Biotechnology. Dr. Luo has given numerous keynotes to both academia and industry and has chaired multiple conferences and workshops. With a publication record of over 160 peer-reviewed papers, Dr. Luo's work has been cited by scientists across more than 30 different countries and 25 research areas.

This class is for educational and informational purposes in alignment with NNLM goals and does not offer medical advice.

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