Controlling the Spreads of Infectious Disease and Scare via Utilizing Location and Social Networking Information

Abstract

Americans were anxious over infectious disease such as Ebola. According to Voice of America's report, more than four in 10 were worried, even though there had only been a few confirmed. People are usually thinking they may have already had an indirect/direct contact with a suspected/confirmed patient because of visiting same places. The scare, therefore, spreads among general public as (i) they suspect the administrative agencies' infection controls are not sufficiently proper, and (ii) there is still no customized model to convince them that their infection probabilities are very low. To address these issues, we propose to utilize location and social networking information to jointly control the spread of infectious disease and the scare among people. This work-in-progress paper specifically introduces our model and research directions.