• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 1, 2016

IBM is putting the power of big data at the disposal of Brazilian officials and non-profit organizations as they work to combat the Zika virus and other communicable diseases during the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and beyond, including crowdsourced data drawn from social media, the company announced last week.

Through one of its IBM Impact Grant programs, IBM is working with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation or Fiocruz, a research institution associated with Brazil’s Ministry of Health, to organize and analyze huge amounts of online data, including the frequency and distribution of social media comments and conversation about Zika as well as dengue fever and Chikungunya, two other dangerous mosquito-borne illnesses.

The joint effort will analyze Portuguese-language Twitter postings about these diseases as well as the prevalence of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, their primary transmission vector. IBM’s formidable computing resources will synthesize this information with other sources of data including travel patterns, geography, the location of roads and airports, and weather, among other factors, to identify outbreaks and high-risk areas and predict future spread in order to make concrete recommendations for action to Brazilian public health officials.

Underpinning the effort is IBM’s Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler, or STEM, software developed by IBM Research Laboratories, which has previously been used to track and predict the spread of other infectious and communicable diseases including influenza and Ebola, as well as mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue.

IBM already has some experience working with Brazilian public health authorities, having provided similar services during the 2014 World Cup, when it analyzed around 60 million social media posts.

The company’s involvement will continue beyond the Olympics with a “hackathon” in Brazil this fall, where programmers will work on new apps, for example, to enable citizens to report sightings of mosquito larvae or local virus outbreaks to public health officials.