Measuring Happiness & Health with Social Media

Chris Danforth is the Flint Professor of Mathematical, Natural, and Technical Sciences at the University of Vermont. He co-directs the Computational Story Lab, a group of applied mathematicians at the undergraduate, masters, phd, and postdoctoral level working on large-scale, system problems in many fields including sociology, nonlinear dynamics, networks, ecology, and physics. Danforth's background is in the application of chaos theory to weather & climate prediction.

His current work is in Computational Social Science, exploring human behavior through social media data. Danforth is the co-inventor of http://hedonometer.org, a socio-technical instrument measuring daily happiness based on 100 billion Twitter messages. He has also developed algorithms to identify predictors of depression from Instagram photos. His research has been covered by the New York Times, Science Magazine, and the BBC among others. Descriptions of his projects are available at his website: http://uvm.edu/~cdanfort