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$1M NSF Award to Support Data-powered Fight Against Pandemics
11/10/22

By Tom Ventsias 

Mandated face coverings vs. no masking. Fourteen days of isolation or five. Online schooling or crowded classrooms. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic at times seems like a cacophony of mixed messaging from public health experts and government officials.

Much of this variance stems from the evolution and tenacity of the virus itself. Yet other factors—pandemic fatigue, physical location, demographics, politics, and the timing and tone of the messaging itself—have fueled varying levels of public skepticism and confusion.

To meet this challenge, University of Maryland researchers are developing sophisticated predictive models and best communication practices needed to combat future pandemics. They’re crunching voluminous data from the current pandemic—analyzing social media content, epidemiological statistics and public statements from officials—to build a seamless, end-to-end network that considers complex and interdependent biological, environmental and human factors.

Their work is funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, part of the organization’s new Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention Program.

A main goal of the UMD project is to develop a digital platform, called PandEval (pandemic evaluation), that can zero in on specific locales, offering a level of detail not widely available during the current pandemic.

“What we’ve seen is a need to improve messaging and policymaking at the local scale,” said Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management in the School of Public Health. “Public acceptance for health-related mandates—things like a statewide shutdown of non-essential businesses—could look very different in Montgomery County than on the Lower Eastern Shore.”

Sehgal, whose work is focused on novel and emerging digital health technologies and their applicability to health care delivery and outcomes, is joined on the project by a multi-institutional team of computational social scientists and data scientists, public health experts, biostatisticians and epidemiologists.

It includes Louiqa Raschid, a dean’s professor of information systems in the Robert H. Smith School of Business who is principal investigator of the award; Vanessa Frias-Martinez, an associate professor in the College of Information Studies; Xiaoli Nan, a professor of communication in the College of Arts and Humanities; Kristina Lerman, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California; and Eili Klein, M.D., an associate professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Raschid and Frias-Martinez have joint appointments in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, which is providing administrative and technical support for the project.

To develop robust algorithms for the PandEval platform, the researchers are curating data that includes almost two billion Twitter posts since January 2020, social media captures from Facebook, GPS digital footprints from location intelligence companies, face masking statistics from a New York Times database and inoculation data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The team will use Twitter and Facebook posts to develop social media-based models of community beliefs and attitudes, offering a window into areas like science skepticism, concern about vaccine safety, a lack of trust in public officials or an unwillingness to contribute to the public good.

Nan and Sehgal are also developing digital tools to evaluate the effectiveness of public health messaging, with a focus on building models that help identify the best person or organization to deliver the right message at the right time.

Frias-Martinez will use her extensive experience in mobility tracking to analyze the GPS data, creating new models to guide safe behavior during pandemics. The software would track activities via smartphones or other mobile devices, and then match it to disease vector models, offering actionable data on whether people should work from home or use public transportation systems.

“We think the benefits of PandEval will be twofold: increasing trust and confidence in our public health infrastructure and giving decision makers epidemiological models that are customized to specific population segments,” said Raschid. “This can be invaluable for things like vaccine rollouts and health-related mandates.”

Making Moves to Counter Misinformation
12/8/21

By Maryland Today Staff 

While the world contended with a pandemic, social media platforms and other sources spewed billions of misleading health messages at users—more than 3.8 billion times on Facebook over the course of a year, according to one study—a dynamic that University of Maryland researchers and their colleagues say can lead to adverse public health outcomes ranging from mistrust in reliable information sources to deaths from disease.

Now, these risk communication experts in the Department of Communication and at the University of Georgia (UGA) are collaborating with researchers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop and test messaging strategies that can help overcome misinformation during public health emergencies.

Supported by a three-year, nearly $225,000 award from the FDA, communication Professor Brooke Fisher Liu and Yan Jin, professor of public relations and Georgia Athletic Association professor at UGA, will develop and test message strategies concerning vital health information that can help keep people safe.

“Past research found a clear link between COVID-19 misinformation exposure and vaccine hesitancy,” said Liu, the project’s principal investigator. “Research also connects misinformation exposure to lower compliance with government health and safety guidance. In short, misinformation is just as great of a threat to public health as the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, but our knowledge is limited on how to combat misinformation.”

The researchers will be among the first to explore how public health misinformation can be corrected through strategic risk communication and what methods work best in thwarting misinformation. They will conduct two large-scale online experiments on how messages containing misinformation and various types of corrective responses are interpreted by U.S. adults.

“This project exemplifies the importance and promising future for more collaborative risk and crisis communication research across universities and with the government to provide theory-driven, evidenced-based insights to protect public health and safety,” said Jin, co-principal investigator.

Liu and Jin’s research collaborations date back to 2001, when they both studied in the graduate program at the Missouri School of Journalism. Now they are joined by graduate research assistants Tori McDermott from UMD, and Xuerong Lu from UGA.

In addition to the experimental results, the research team will also provide a targeted deep-dive analysis of previous research, and will recommend best practices for how public health agencies can combat health misinformation for current and future threats.

This article was adapted from a news release by the University of Georgia.

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