Twitter data grant winners include three health projects

Three health projects were chosen as recipients of Twitter’s #DataGrants pilot program, which aims to give a handful of research institutions access to its public and historical data.

The social media site had received more than 1,300 proposals from more than 60 different countries, with many coming from outside the U.S, according to an announcement on the award winners.

Three of the winning six proposals were for health projects. These included:

• Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Children’s Hospital for a project utilizing Twitter data for foodborne gastrointestinal illness surveillance;
• The University of San Diego in California and City University of New York for a project that utilizes Twitter data, particularly images, to measure the happiness of different city populations;
• The University of Twente in the Netherlands for a research project examining the diffusion and effectiveness of cancer early detection campaigns on Twitter.

Other projects that received funding involved disaster information analysis, urban flooding modeling and exploring the relationship between Tweets and sports team performance.

View the announcement here.