Alex Morales

Alex Morales
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Computer Science

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18
Publications
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269
Citations

Publications

Publications (18)
Article
Given the widespread dissemination of inaccurate medical advice related to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), such as fake remedies, treatments and prevention suggestions, misinformation detection has emerged as an open problem of high importance and interest for the research community. Several works study health misinformation detection, ye...
Article
Full-text available
Background The vaccination uptake rates of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine remain low despite the fact that the effectiveness of HPV vaccines has been established for more than a decade. Vaccine hesitancy is in part due to false information about HPV vaccines on social media. Combating false HPV vaccine information is a reasonable step to ad...
Preprint
BACKGROUND The vaccination uptake rates of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine remain low despite the fact that the effectiveness of HPV vaccines has been established for more than a decade. Vaccine hesitancy is in part due to false information about HPV vaccines on social media. Combating false HPV vaccine information is a reasonable step to addres...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives: Acceptance of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and testing for HIV is likely to vary as a function of the norms and communications within a geographic area. This study examined associations involving county tweets, in person communications, and HIV prevention and testing in regions with higher (vs. lower) estimated rates of men who have...
Preprint
Given the wide spread of inaccurate medical advice related to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), such as fake remedies, treatments and prevention suggestions, misinformation detection has emerged as an open problem of high importance and interest for the NLP community. To combat potential harm of COVID19-related misinformation, we release Co...
Article
Full-text available
Drug use reporting is often a bottleneck for modern public health surveillance; social media data provides a real-time signal which allows for tracking and monitoring opioid overdoses. In this work we focus on text-based feature construction for the prediction task of opioid overdose rates at the county level. More specifically, using a Twitter dat...
Preprint
Full-text available
With the rise of opioid abuse in the US, there has been a growth of overlapping hotspots for overdose-related and HIV-related deaths in Springfield, Boston, Fall River, New Bedford, and parts of Cape Cod. With a large part of population, including rural communities, active on social media, it is crucial that we leverage the predictive power of soci...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives: Social media messages have been increasingly used in health campaigns about prevention, testing, and treatment of HIV. We identified factors leading to the retransmission of messages from expert social media accounts to create data-driven recommendations for online HIV messaging. Design and methods: We sampled 20,201 HIV-related twee...
Article
Full-text available
The present study evaluated the potential use of Twitter data for providing risk indices of STIs. We developed Online Risk Indices (ORIs) based on tweets to predict new HIV, gonorrhea, and chlamydia diagnoses, across U.S. counties and across five years. We analyzed over one hundred million tweets from 2009 to 2013 using open-vocabulary techniques a...
Conference Paper
Online reviews have been popularly adopted in many applications. Since they can either promote or harm the reputation of a product or a service, buying and selling fake reviews becomes a profitable business and a big threat. In this paper, we introduce a very simple, but powerful review spamming technique that could fail the existing feature-based...
Conference Paper
Online reviews are widely adopted in many websites such as Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Positive reviews can bring significant financial gains, while negative ones often cause sales loss. This fact, unfortunately, results in strong incentives for opinion spam to mislead readers. Instead of hiring humans to write deceptive reviews, in this work, w...
Conference Paper
A common problem with cellular network is achieving both coverage and capacity with relatively low cost. By placing fewer number of base station towers we can reduce the total cost of deploying cellular networks. Finding the optimal placement for these base stations is crucial in reducing the number of base stations in the network. Unlike other sen...

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