Algorithms: Transparency of Methodology

      To tackle the problem of retrieving Twitter data, Healthify’s aggregation technique uses a dictionary-based storage system which enables fast modification of information to make tasks like adding new illness terms as simple as possible. The input data is stored as a set of key-value pairs, where keys correspond to specific illnesses (e.g. influenza, gastroenteritis) and values are lists of query tags associated with that particular disease (e.g. [flu, influenza, h1n1, adenovirus, …]). The resulting information about tweets is stored in a separate table which enables fast querying of data for the system