Saurav Ghosh

Saurav Ghosh was a DAC Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science advised by Naren Ramakrishnan, director of DAC. His primary research interests are data analytics, machine learning, forecasting and their applications in public health and education. He studied whether disease reporting trends in news media can be used to monitor and possibly predict infectious disease outbreaks in different regions of the world. In addition, he studied whether the predictive accuracy can be augmented by incorporating changes in climatic attributes (such as temperature, precipitation, and rainfall) into the news-corpora driven model. On another project, he worked on automatic extraction of Linelists (tabular history of patients containing demographic details, disease onset details and clinical parameters) from structured WHO/MOH feeds for emerging infectious diseases, such as MERS in Saudi Arabia and Korea. Such LineLists are very useful to epidemiologists to accurately estimate disease spread factors such as basic reproductive numbers and arrive at accurate models to forecast spread of emerging diseases.