Google Flu trends (Nature, Aug'08) tracks the query volume of the symptoms of a disease like Flu; its a pretty neat idea, especially for countries that do not h

Google Flu trends (Nature, Aug'08) tracks the query volume of the symptoms of a disease like Flu; its a pretty neat idea, especially for countries that do not have a CDC-scale disease surveillance system. An important question is whether/how such a surveillance method can be used for early epidemic detection. In our work, we augmented the capabilities of Google Flu Trends by evaluating algorithms that can translate the raw search query volume produced by this service into actionable alerts and developed Flubreaks, a live system that uses Flu Trends data: http://dritte.org/flubreaks/ http://dritte.org/flubreaks/