Anastasia Angelopoulou, a Columbus State University Assistant Professor of Computer Science, was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a study related to COVID-19. Angelopoulou will use data from Twitter, including hashtags, ages, and locations, to determine the public’s compliance to social distancing and public health guidelines.
 
“Most of the COVID-19 projection models are based on assumptions about how willing the public is to comply with social distancing,” said Angelopoulou. “This study collects data based on different hashtags to see how exactly the public views and complies with mitigation strategies, particularly among different age groups and locations.”
 
The one-year study will collect data every month starting immediately. The data will form the basis of a multi-paradigm simulation model of how individuals in the U.S. react to certain mitigation strategies and public health guidelines. The findings will be publicly available at the end of the project, and health agencies could use it to improve their models. Angelopoulou is working in collaboration with Drs. Konstantinos Mykoniatis and Alice Smith, professors at Auburn University.