The Durkheim Project goes live!

July 3, 2013

As of today, the Durkheim Project is now live. This is a research project involving Patterns and Predictions, the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Facebook. See the Durkheim Project launch announcement for full details.

Durkheim Project

The worthy goal of the Durkheim Project is to improve the medical community’s ability to predict suicides. The driving force was original the military’s concern about increasing suicide rates among service personnel, which is why DARPA funded the initial phase of the project. However the CDC recently released a report based on 10 years of suicide data in the US that clearly shows this is a problem for all Americans.

We were a (small) part of the project, implementing both the Cassandra-based data capture system being used by the Facebook app, and Cascading-based workflows to apply predictive analytics models at scale to social media data. I gave a talk at the 2013 Cassandra Summit on the project.

To participate in the Durkheim Project, please go to https://apps.facebook.com/durkheimsocial/

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