Tracking Viruses & Rumors

An incredibly interesting article, “An algorithm for tracking viruses (and Twitter rumors) to their source” published on Gigaom discusses new Swiss research to track the viral spread of…well, just about anything. We’re excited to experiment with this on Recorded Future data. Because Recorded Future collects, structures data from the web, and organizes it around time, it lends itself to these kinds of experiments.

A team of Swiss researchers thinks it has created an algorithm capable of tracking almost anything — from computer viruses to terrorist attacks to epidemics — back to the source using a minimal amount of data. The trick is focusing on time to figure out who “infected” whom.