WASHINGTON: Scientists have developed a new system that tells you how likely it is for you to fall ill if you visit a particular restaurant by 'listening' to the tweets from other restaurant patrons.
The University of Rochester researchers said their system , nEmesis, can help people make more informed decisions, and it also has the potential to complement traditional public health methods for monitoring food safety , such as restaurant inspections.
The new system combines machine-learning and crowdsourcing techniques to analyse millions of tweets to find people reporting food poisoning symptoms following a restaurant visit. This volume of tweets would be impossible to analyse manually, the researchers noted.
The system "listens" to relevant public tweets and detects restaurant visits by matching up where a person tweets from and the known locations of restaurants. People will often tweet from their phones which are GPS enabled . This means that tweets can be "geotagged" : the tweet not only provides information in the 140 characters allowed , but also about where the user was at the time.
If a user tweets from a location that is determined to be a restaurant, the system will continue to track this person's tweets for 72 hours. If a user then tweets about feeling ill, the system captures the information that this person is now ill and had visited a specific restaurant.
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