Hello Redditors! I’m Elad Yom-Tov, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. I am a Machine Learning and Information Retrieval researcher, and for the past few years my work has focused on using Internet data to study our health. Internet data are all those things that we create while browsing the web: posts on Facebook and Twitter, queries on Google and Bing, blogs, and other content. These data can teach us about aspects of medicine that are hard to learn about in other ways. A few examples include measuring the effect of mainstream media on the development of eating disorders, estimating the effectiveness of flu vaccines, detecting new side effects of medical drugs, and discovering how visiting a dating site can lead to catching an STD. My book on these topics, Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine (MIT Press) was published earlier this year. AMA, including questions you are interested in, and perhaps we can research together! I will be back at 11 am EDT (8 am PDT) to answer your questions, AMA! Edit: Folks, thank you for your being interested in this work, and for your questions. It was a real pleasure discussing my work with you. I’ll check in later to see if there are additional questions.