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Assistant Professor of Psychology Alissa Haedt-Matt and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Aron Culotta have together been awarded $25,000 in grant funding from the ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Institute of Technology. The funding is from  ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Tech's Educational and Research Initiative Fund, and will support a project titled "Social Media Analysis of Indicators of Eating Disorder Treatment Seeking Behavior."

The grant will allow Haedt-Matt and Culotta to hire one Ph.D. student in clinical psychology and one graduate student in computer science to provide research assistance for the 2019–2020 year. The students hired will be involved in a large-scale social media data analysis of online behaviors in hope of improving the prevention, detection, and treatment of eating disorders.

"The broad, long-term objective of this research is to increase our understanding of the social and behavioral processes associated with eating disorders and their treatment through social media data analytics," Haedt-Matt says. 

The researchers will develop algorithms to identify language suggesting a desire to seek treatment for an eating disorder. They will also look for personal and linguistic characteristics that can help predict which users are likely to seek treatment.

Haedt-Matt and Culotta will utilize results from this study to help build a grant proposal they’ll submit to the National Institutes of Health.

"This proposal would support a larger project involving social media analysis of a clinically identified sample with eating disorders, and integration of multiple large sources of data (e.g., across social-media platforms, fitness trackers, nutrition/food intake apps, and ecological momentary assessment)," Haedt-Matt says.