Increasing COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence – Columbia World Projects Program
As the first Humanities project in the Columbia World Projects program, this project seeks to increase public confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine. By harnessing the power of data science and artificial intelligence, it will develop evidence-based public messaging that encourages vaccination, in partnership with local public health departments.
The project will engage vaccine makers, literary scholars, data scientists, political scientists, community leaders and public health officials. It will create the world’s largest public dataset of vaccine-hesitant language in English, collected from online forums such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which have become primary platforms for discussing and disseminating vaccine skepticism and other vaccine-related concerns. Leveraging the power of such collected data, the project will use artificial intelligence to develop public messaging that reflects the ways in which people express specific forms of hesitancy. This approach represents a significant effort to use AI to analyze the language of vaccine hesitancy and then use that language to combat vaccine skepticism.
This project is co-led by ICLS affiliated faculty Rishi Goyal and Dennis Yi Tenen.
Click here to learn more about this project, its background, and the team.
