PHDA 2013
1st International Workshop on Public Health in the Digital Age:
Social Media, Crowdsourcing and Participatory Systems

14th May 2013

Held in conjunction with the WWW 2013

http://www.digitalhealth.ws/
#PHDA2013
#digitalhealth
@ehealth_conf

WORKSHOP AIMS

Web-based systems, on-line information streams and mobile devices have
radically changed the way we monitor large-scale communities and
engage with them. This workshop aims to explore how this revolution
impacts on the ability to monitor signals related to public health in
real time, engage with citizens and support public health interventions
at individual and population levels underpinned by real time situational
awareness.

The enormous potential to improve public health through harvesting,
analysis, visualisation of Big Data cannot be more clearly expressed.
Public health needs to leverage cutting edge computer science and
availability of real time Big Data from social networks, blogs, games,
24x7 online media providing constant stream of real time situation-aware
data to be harnessed, analysed and rapidly responded to increase public
participation and avoid public health threats. Existing systems
illustrating the potential of analysis of online data include HealthMap,
Medisys, participatory flu surveillance system Epiworks and the Swine
flu 2009 early warning system using Twitter developed at City University.
Finally, due to social media and social networks, risk communication and
public information about health threats takes place online in conjunction
with official and traditional health communication channels.

The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to bring together public
health professionals working in public health and epidemic intelligence
services in WHO, ECDC, CDC and computer science researches in Big Data
mining, crowdsourcing and SM user engagement to raise awareness of one
of the most critical global applications: public health, user participation
and risk communication.

WORKSHOP AUDIENCE

Public health informatics covers a wide spectrum of healthcare
including surveillance, persuasive techniques for behaviour change,
risk assessment and risk communication and epidemic intelligence,
automated early identification of health threats and response.

Submissions are welcome from the range of stakeholders involved in
digital public health including:

- academia (computer scientists, health informaticians, public
health experts, epidemiologists, etc)
- national public health sector (e.g. HPA, InVS, RKI, etc)
- international public health agencies (ECDC, WHO, CDC, etc)
- epidemic intelligence systems providers (GPHNIN, Medysis,
HealthMap, etc)
- NGOs and Agencies with relevant remit (MSF, Red Cross/Crescent,
UNHCR, UN ITU, etc)

WORKSHOP TOPICS

The topics include but are not restricted to:

- online social networks and Web-based participatory systems for
public health
- mining social media streams and micro-blogging systems for public
health signals
- epidemic intelligence and early warning using search and social
media data mining
- crowdsourcing, user engagement, user modeling
- online machine learning and public health event detection from
social media streams
- situational awareness for public health
- Big data analysis of disease prevalence
- validation and trust algorithms and models
- visual analytics and exploratory data analysis of social media
for public health
- development of integrated platforms harvesting and analysing real
time data for early warning and rapid response
- algorithms and methods for risk communication for public health
using traditional and social media
- information diffusion models for public health
- modelling public engagement for public health using analysis of
social media networks

IMPORTANT DATES

- Submission Deadline: (extended) 4th March 2013
- Notification of Acceptance: 13th March 2013
- Camera-Ready Deadline: 3rd April 2013
- Workshop Date: 14th May 2013

PUBLICATIONS

All papers will be peer reviewed by three members of the TPC for
relevance, originality, quality and included in the ACM WWW 2013
Workshops Proceedings

SUBMISSIONS REQUIREMENTS

- Submissions via the EasyChair conference system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=phda2013
- Language: English
- Format: ACM SIG Proceedings template with the font size no smaller
than 9pt:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
- Standard Original Papers: 8 Pages
- Short Original Papers: 4 Pages
- Extended Abstracts (Oral or Posters): 1 Page

COMMITTEES

Conference General and Scientific Chairs

- Patty Kostkova, City University, London, UK
- Daniela Paolotti, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
- John Brownstein, Harvard Medical School Boston, USA

Web Chair

- Andre Panisson, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy

Technical Program Committee

- Patty Kostkova, City University, London, UK
- Ciro Cattuto, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy
- John S Brownstein, Harvard University, Boston, USA
- Martin Szomszor, Data Science, UK
- Pasi Penttinen, ECDC, Stockholm, Sweden
- Maciej Dabrowski, DERI, Ireland
- Taha Kass-Hout, CDC, USA
- Daniela Paolotti, ISI Foundation, Italy
- Vittoria Colizza, INSERM, France
- Bruno Gonçalves, CNRS, France
- Marcel Salathé, Penn State, USA
- Andrea Apolloni, LSHTM, UK
- Rumi Chunara, Harvard Medical School, USA
- Javier Munoz, WHO PAHO, USA
- Andre Panisson, ISI Foundation, Italy