Combining machine learning technology with smartphone tracking data to create an app that accurately estimates the spread of flu.
In what suggests a new study published in the magazine Nature Communications, which describes how an application was developed for this purpose.
big data
To create their app, the researchers collected anonymous tracking data from Android phone users in New York City; Google stores the history of users who have chosen to allow such tracking to be recorded. They used that data to teach a machine learning system to recognize human movement on a city map.
The team then added data from models created to represent flu transmission rates based on patients' hospital visits and laboratory reports for the 2016 to 2017 flu season.
They used the application to predict the spread of the flu for the same season. They later compared the results to actual flu season records and found that they were as accurate as two of the three conventional systems based on passenger data and better than a third.
Finally, the researchers replicated their efforts to predict the 2016 flu season for all of Australia and They discovered that it could accurately predict the spread of the flu in that country.
The researchers note that using phone tracking data is significantly less expensive than using traveler data. They also noted that their system could also be used to track the spread of an outbreak as it crosses international lines, unlike systems based on passenger data.
–
The news
Thanks to phone tracking data combined with machine learning, we can predict the spread of the flu
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Is this where it all begins?
The footage is absolutely breathtaking – and could help us better understand miscarriages.
Antarctica was once at the equator. These are some of the findings that you can see in the following video: 1 billion years of continental drift in 40 seconds.
The video is the result of research published in the March 2021 issue of Earth-Science Reviews. For the first time it has been built a complete model of tectonics, including all limits.
Continental drift
The main author and creator of the video, Andrew Merdith He began working on the project while he was a PhD student with Dietmar Müller of the EarthByte geosciences group at the University of Sydney.
The model will help scientists understand how the climate has changed, how ocean currents were altered, and how nutrients flowed from deep within the Earth to stimulate biological evolution.
The Continental drift It is the displacement of continental masses with respect to each other. This theory It was developed in 1912 for the german Alfred Wegener based on various empirical-rational observations, but it was not until the 1960s, with the development of plate tectonics, when the movement of the continents could be adequately explained. Life, quite simply, on Earth would not exist without plate tectonics.
–
The news
The uninterrupted movement of the Earth's tectonic plates during the last 1 billion years in 40 seconds
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.