MIGHTE

Principal Investigator
Mauricio Santillana, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering
Network Science Institute,
Northeastern University

The Machine Intelligence Group for the betterment of Health and the Environment (MIGHTE), now based at the Network Science Institute, at Northeastern University and the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (from 2017 to 2022, our research lab, the Machine Intelligence Lab, was based at Boston Children’s Hospital) has a multidisciplinary research agenda. Our research involves the conception and implementation of machine intelligence analytics tools, capable of predicting unobserved events in epidemiology and healthcare in the immediate or near future. Our work ranges from tracking disease outbreaks around the Globe, leveraging information from big data sets from Internet-based services (such as Google search activity, Twitter microblogs, Weather, Human Mobility, Electronic Health Records), to bed-side patient-centered monitoring approaches aimed at improving care in clinical settings. We also focus on the use of mathematical approaches to discover relationships between relevant outcomes in the health, physical and environmental sciences. For example we have studied the influence of climate change on the prevalence of antibiotic resistant infections, or the role of socio-economic factors and political leaning and mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Generally speaking, our approaches use machine learning techniques to identify patterns that have occurred historically that may be predictive of specific and future events of interest, for example:

Can we characterize the time evolution of a disease outbreak in a population by analyzing:
- disease-related search activity on Internet search engines?
- the local air temperature/humidity in their location?
- human mobility patterns?
- multiple disparate Internet-based data sources ?
Can we identify real-time vital signs patterns in a patient's hospital visit that may suggest the need to intervene or change care plans, hours (or days) before this happens?

Our team consists of applied mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, public health experts, and clinicians.