Public Health is a new frontier for emergency response teams and relevant government authorities, and the spread of the recent COVID-19 global pandemic has only made the issue more pressing.
The spread of the virus is often evident in social media and internet data prior to news coverage or other conventional intelligence-gathering methods, as affected individuals often tend to post and communicate about their status on social media with others.
Texts and photos uploaded to social networks and gathered automatically provided valuable intelligence to authorities who were carrying epidemiological investigations. By extracting the critical data, they were provided with intelligence, which allowed them to identify who may have been in contact with an infected individual.
Analyzing the images and videos gathered by using AI and Cobwebs WEBINT platforms as well as natural language processing tools, allowed authorities to deconstruct posts on social media and distinguish between someone discussing news of the virus and someone posting about how they feel.
The analysis of the texts and images also helped authorities classify and categorize the importance of the data.
Governments and authorities must be able to gather and analyze multiplatform social media and internet big data in a meaningful fashion so as to be able to both maintain situational awareness and enable preemptive action before the pandemic spreads even further, as well as harnessing this powerful data to keep track of already affected areas and monitor recovery efforts.
Regional health care professionals were also able to leverage Cobwebs’ capabilities of automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies in order to gain vast additional insights.
By adapting Cobwebs’ proprietary web intelligence system which autonomously scours the internet for masses of relevant data, signals, and patterns, authorities were able to predict mobility trends from COVID-19 hotspots, allowing them to make critical decisions in order to contain the deadly virus.
Cobwebs Technologies’ proprietary WEBINT platform has proven essential in numerous virus-monitoring cases in the recent past, empowering relevant authorities to take decisive action and save lives.
