bigthink.com – by Orion Jones - By feeding 630,000 New York City residents' 4.4 million tweets into an algorithm, researchers at the University of Rochester were able to predict when healthy people would fall ill with about 90 per cent accuracy out to eight days in the future. Importantly, each tweet the team analyzed was tagged with GPS location data. That allowed researchers to track the spread of flu symptoms across space and time, enabling them to predict who would contract the flu even before any symptoms were exhibited. The algorithm was taught the difference between tweets by healthy people, who might say something like 'I am so sick of this traffic!', and someone who is actually sick and showing signs of the flu.

Link to Story: http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/algorithm-can-predict-when-youll-fall-ill-before-showing-any-symptoms