St Andrews researchers Chris Norval and Tristan Henderson won the Best Paper award at the Mining Online Health Reports workshop, part of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2017). The workshop brought together experts from academia, industry and the health sector to discuss techniques and future priorities for analysing online data for health research.

Norval and Henderson’s paper argued that the successful exploitation of people’s social data requires new and usable methods of obtaining consent, and proposed the use of machine learning algorithms to predict when someone is likely to give consent for their data to be used. This work forms part of a Wellcome Trust funded project on understanding consent for sharing health data over online social networks.