For the last two years, a team of School of Business faculty and students, led by Dr. Daniel O’Malley, residential chair for Computer Science, has utilized a grant from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to conduct research and develop a data-collection application in an effort to strengthen the United States’ fight against the ongoing opioid epidemic.
The team began the process in early 2019 after seeing a report by the CDC stating that around 70,000 people in the U.S. died from an overdose in 2018, many of whom were living in the Appalachia region. They approached the issue by studying trends and activity on social media by state. By looking at what people are posting on these publicly available platforms, noting what words or phrases they’re using, and comparing them to a list of keywords linked to opioid usage, the goal was to anticipate possible hotspots for opioid overdoses.
With their work now concluded and the publication process underway, O’Malley said the team was successful in anticipating opioid increases in certain regions.
In addition to these findings, the grant also supported the team in developing an application, the Criminal Predictive Analytic Platform (CPAP), that will soon be used by the DHS’ cybercrimes division to gather a large number of publicly available data sets in order to further predict geographic areas of future
opioid abuse.
