Featured

This project will investigate the quality of Instagram textual posts as a source of data for measurements of dietary patterns and nutrition quality, focusing on spatial and textual features of posts linked to food outlets. Using an Instagram dataset of all geo-located posts at food outlets in Los Angeles for 3 months in 2014, this project will investigate whether Instagram posts, despite implicit biases (and to the extent possible, accounting for these biases), can provide a representative health signal, informative of the quality of population nutrition and dietary patterns at a highly-resolved (e.g. census tract level) spatial scale.

SideEffects is a cancer patient’s resource to access treatment and side effects tailored to the patient’s treatment and disease history. The app sources content from clinical data, National Cancer Institute, social media, and user input from an app.

Droughts can have a substantial impact on agricultural systems and human livelihood. A Python package to calculate various drought indices in being developed. In this project, you will expand on this package and develop methods to test the sensitivity of the models to various input datasets and parameters.

Since 1992, the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies ‘Catalina Conservation Divers’ have been collecting underwater biological and environmental data from coastal ocean sites around Catalina Island, California. In cooperation with the USC Wrigley Institute, the CCD team (made up of community scientists and volunteer SCUBA divers) conducts quarterly surveys of marine species and benthic water temperatures at various depths and locations. The Wrigley Institute has been collecting and archiving this data for years, and the data has not been holistically studied to date. We need assistance in analyzing data for trends across location, ocean depth, and time.