Launched in 2008, Google Flu Trends was one of the earliest systems demonstrating the power of "big data", harnessing the collective intelligence of 100's of millions of search users to accurately track the spread of disease outbreaks. When the first cases of H1N1 Swine Flu emerged in 2009, the United States CDC and health agencies around the world relied on Flu Trends to help inform key public health decisions. In this talk, I cover the origins of the project and the methodology we developed, along with a retrospective on some of the lessons learned.

Bio: Jeremy Ginsberg is a software leader with 17 years of experience building products and leading teams in Silicon Valley. Most recently, Jeremy served as Head of Engineering and Data Science at Color, a fast-growing health tech startup in California. Jeremy now lives in Auckland, New Zealand and works with Movac as CTO-in-Residence. Previously, Jeremy was a Vice President at Twitter where he led the global revenue engineering teams. Jeremy also spent 9 years as a software engineer and technical lead at Google, where he led projects focused on machine learning, search quality, survey analytics, and a novel disease surveillance project called Flu Trends. Jeremy holds a M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. Jeremy's connection to New Zealand dates back to 2002, when he taught computer science at Victoria University of Wellington.

This talk is part of the New Zealand Software Innovation Seminar (SI^NZ) Series: https://softwareinnovation.nz/seminars/

Zoom Link (not recorded): https://vuw.zoom.us/my/softwareinnovationnewzealand