Mining the internet for drug information

摘要

NS Dr Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft and an alum of our graduate program, gave the keynote speech at one of our graduate program retreats. Over a campfire, Eric, Dr Russ Altman (a professor of bioengi-neering, genetics, and medicine at Stanford University) and I were speaking about drug safety and how common it is for people to search the Internet for information about drug safety and side effects. Google Flu Trends, a tool for tracking flu cases, had just been released, and we began wondering if it might be possible to detect adverse events in the same way that others were detecting flu. That speculation is how the project started.