Meet the bots that knew Ebola was coming

A computer program run by epidemiologists in Boston had already alerted key agencies of the U.S. government about West Africa's Ebola outbreak four days before the World Health Organization first announced it. John Brownstein, associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital, is a cofounder of Healthmap.org, a group that scours social media and online news sources for early signs of disease outbreaks.

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