Can Facebook Predict Suicide Risks?

MARSHALL HONOROF for TechNewsDaily 1 day ago

If you've been thinking about killing yourself, your social media might give you away. An initiative called the Durkheim Project will use artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to identify common words and phrases among those who might be contemplating suicide.

The program, which launched on July 2, currently targets only veterans, who have disproportionately high suicide rates. Veterans opt into the Durkheim Project, which installs an app on computers, iOS and Android devices. These apps keep track of what users post and upload it to a medical database. A medical AI monitors the data in real time, picking out patterns that might lead to self-harm.

The Durkheim Project app monitors content from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition, it stores information from a user's mobile device. A database at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth University will keep track of users' locations and text messages, and will not share any information with third parties. Additionally, the system will be guarded by a firewall to ward off would-be hackers.

"The study we've begun with our research partners will build a rich knowledge base that eventually could enable timely interventions by mental health professionals," said Chris Poulin, principal investigator on the project, in a statement. "Facebook's capability for outreach is unparalleled."

This project has a dark side, however: While future versions of the app may notify professionals if an individual appears to be at risk for harmful behavior, its current version is completely noninterventional. Since veterans commit suicide far more often than the general populace, the Durkheim Project may gain some of its most valuable data by tracking active social media users who go on to kill themselves.

That said, the research rests on solid ground. Poulin and a team of investigators ran the program's first phase in 2011, which examined social media from veterans who were active online. The findings were telling: more than 65 percent of users who went on to commit suicideemployed key words or phrases on a regular basis on their social media accounts.

The Durkheim Project may not achieve its long-term goal: The program requires users to opt-in, and those who feel suicidal may not feel inclined to reach out for help. Additionally, the original study only tracked correlation: There's no indication that veterans who post negative statuses necessarily go on to kill themselves.

Even so, a project hoping to reduce suicide among veterans is a noble goal, and the Durkheim Project welcomes anyone who wants to help. Through cooperation among mental healthprofessionals and technology experts, a veteran's social media page could be much more than a collection of sad statuses leading to his or her untimely death.

Photo via iStockphoto, BobbieO

This article originally published at TechNewsDaily here

Report: Facebook to Launch Graph Search Monday

Facebook will launch its upgraded search engine Monday, The New York Times reports.

Originally announced in January 2013 and dubbed Graph Search, the new search engine lets you search your Facebook social graph for people, places, photos and interests.

With the new search engine, users will be able to ask specific questions, such as "which of my friends live in New York?" Graph Search is also integrated with Microsoft's Bing, meaning it will offer web search results if it can't find anything useful in your graph.

According to The New York Times, Graph Search is still far from perfect: it can't find info in status updates, it can't leverage data from third-party apps (even Instagram), and it's not available in Facebook mobile apps.

We're very interested to see how the Graph Search works in practice at this stage, and we'll have a detailed rundown when it arrives.

Image by Emily Price, Mashable

Americans Spend 23 Hours Per Week Online, Texting

BusinessNewsDaily 12 hours ago

Staying up-to-date on emails, social media and other forms of online communication can take a lot of time — more time than many people may realize. New research has found that the average user spends 23 hours every week emailing, texting, using social media and communicating online in other ways.

That number represents nearly 14% of the total time in a week. All that time is taking a toll on users, a new eMarketer report found. However, 54% of survey respondents said they have tried to decrease their reliance on technology in the past year in favor of more in-person contact. That number is only set to grow, with 62% of web users in the United States saying they hope to be able to decrease tech usage in the coming year so they can communicate face-to-face.

Despite those efforts, over the past year, users have increased the time they have spent usingsocial networks, emailing, watching online videos, playing online games and reading or writing blogs. Additionally, time spent each day on online radio, newspapers and magazines has remained constant over the past year.

Email is the biggest time consumer, researchers found. Respondents said they spend nearly eight hours per week checking emails. They also said they spend nearly seven hours per week on Facebook and five hours per week on YouTube. Moreover, users spend nearly the same amount of time each week on Google+ and Twitter.

Users are checking those platforms with varying frequency, though, the eMarketer report found. More than 75% of users checked email, texts, Facebook and Instagram at least one time a day. Other new platforms are growing in popularity as well.

"Photo-focused sites, particularly suited to mobile, seem to be especially popular," the eMarketerreport said. "Instagram saw 70% of users logging in daily, and the relatively new Snapchat was just behind, with 67% of its users logging in daily."

Two-thirds of users also said they check YouTube once per day, while nearly 60% check Google+ daily. Just 40% of LinkedIn users check the site daily, but nearly half check it several times a week.

"Even as web users report a desire to disconnect, and discussion circulates about Facebook users decreasing time spent, it remains to be seen whether social users will follow through on that promise to log off, or perhaps simply translate their time spent on social to the sites that best suit their communication needs," the eMarketer report said.

Image via iStockphoto, Tsuji

This article originally published at BusinessNewsDaily here

Pew: 6% of Online Adults Use Reddit

Social news site Reddit has come a long way since the days it played second fiddle to (now mostly abandoned) Digg. According to a new report by Pew Internet, 6% of online adults in the U.S. are Reddit users.

The report is based on a telephone survey conducted in April and May 2013 among a sample of 2,252 adults, age 18 and over.

According to the report, 15% of male internet users ages 18-29 use Reddit. With men aged 30-49, this percentage drops to 8%, and 5% of women aged 18-29 say they use the site.

Reddit, which allows users to vote and thus choose which stories will appear on its front page, has grown tremendously in 2010, partly as a result of the exodus of users from Digg. The Condé Nast-owned site never looked back, reaching 2 billion pageviews in December 2011 and 3.4 billion pageviews as well as 43 million monthly active users in August 2012.

You can read the full report here.

Image courtesy of Flickr/Eva Blue