Several projects have shown the feasibility to use textual social media data to track public health concerns, such as temporal influenza patterns or geographical obesity patterns. In this paper, we look at whether geo-tagged images from Instagram also provide a viable data source. Especially for "lifestyle" diseases, such as obesity, drinking or smoking, images of social gatherings could provide information that is not necessarily shared in, say, tweets. In this study, we explore whether (i) tags provided by the users and (ii) annotations obtained via automatic image tagging are indeed valuable for studying public health. We find that both user-provided and machine-generated tags provide information that can be used to infer a county's health statistics. Whereas for most statistics user-provided tags are better features, for predicting excessive drinking machine-generated tags such as "liquid" and "glass" yield better models. This hints at the potential of using machine-generated tags to study substance abuse.
Almost all the methods above rely on textual content though images and other rich multimedia form a major chunk of content being generated and shared in social media. Automatic image annotation has greatly improved over the last couple of years, owing to the development in deep learning @cite_20 . Object recognition @cite_24 and image tagging @cite_8 have become possible because of these new developments, e.g. @cite_8 use deep learning to produce descriptions of images, which compete with (and sometimes beat) human generated labels. A few studies already make use of these advances to identify @cite_10 and study @cite_22 food consumption from pictures.
@cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_24 @cite_10 @cite_20
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Building upon recent Deep Neural Network architectures, current approaches lying in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing have achieved unprecedented breakthroughs in tasks like automatic captioning or image retrieval. Most of these learning methods, though, rely on large training sets of images associated with human annotations that specifically describe the visual content. In this paper we propose to go a step further and explore the more complex cases where textual descriptions are loosely related to the images. We focus on the particular domain of News articles in which the textual content often expresses connotative and ambiguous relations that are only suggested but not directly inferred from images. We introduce new deep learning methods that address source detection, popularity prediction, article illustration and geolocation of articles. An adaptive CNN architecture is proposed, that shares most of the structure for all the tasks, and is suitable for multitask and transfer learning. Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis is deployed for article illustration, and a new loss function based on Great Circle Distance is proposed for geolocation. Furthermore, we present BreakingNews, a novel dataset with approximately 100K news articles including images, text and captions, and enriched with heterogeneous meta-data (such as GPS coordinates and popularity metrics). We show this dataset to be appropriate to explore all aforementioned problems, for which we provide a baseline performance using various Deep Learning architectures, and different representations of the textual and visual features. We report very promising results and bring to light several limitations of current state-of-the-art in this kind of domain, which we hope will help spur progress in the field. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have seen tremendous success in large-scale generic object recognition. In comparison with generic object recognition, fine-grained image classification (FGIC) is much more challenging because (i) fine-grained labeled data is much more expensive to acquire (usually requiring domain expertise); (ii) there exists large intra-class and small inter-class variance. Most recent work exploiting deep CNN for image recognition with small training data adopts a simple strategy: pre-train a deep CNN on a large-scale external dataset (e.g., ImageNet) and fine-tune on the small-scale target data to fit the specific classification task. In this paper, beyond the fine-tuning strategy, we propose a systematic framework of learning a deep CNN that addresses the challenges from two new perspectives: (i) identifying easily annotated hyper-classes inherent in the fine-grained data and acquiring a large number of hyper-class-labeled images from readily available external sources (e.g., image search engines), and formulating the problem into multitask learning; (ii) a novel learning model by exploiting a regularization between the fine-grained recognition model and the hyper-class recognition model. We demonstrate the success of the proposed framework on two small-scale fine-grained datasets (Stanford Dogs and Stanford Cars) and on a large-scale car dataset that we collected. Large-scale datasets have driven the rapid development of deep neural networks for visual recognition. However, annotating a massive dataset is expensive and time-consuming. Web images and their labels are, in comparison, much easier to obtain, but direct training on such automatically harvested images can lead to unsatisfactory performance, because the noisy labels of Web images adversely affect the learned recognition models. To address this drawback we propose an end-to-end weakly-supervised deep learning framework which is robust to the label noise in Web images. The proposed framework relies on two unified strategies -- random grouping and attention -- to effectively reduce the negative impact of noisy web image annotations. Specifically, random grouping stacks multiple images into a single training instance and thus increases the labeling accuracy at the instance level. Attention, on the other hand, suppresses the noisy signals from both incorrectly labeled images and less discriminative image regions. By conducting intensive experiments on two challenging datasets, including a newly collected fine-grained dataset with Web images of different car models, the superior performance of the proposed methods over competitive baselines is clearly demonstrated. Automatic image annotation is still an important open problem in multimedia and computer vision. The success of media sharing websites has led to the availability of large collections of images tagged with human-provided labels. Many approaches previously proposed in the literature do not accurately capture the intricate dependencies between image content and annotations. We propose a learning procedure based on Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis which finds a mapping between visual and textual words by projecting them into a latent meaning space. The learned mapping is then used to annotate new images using advanced nearest-neighbor voting methods. We evaluate our approach on three popular datasets, and show clear improvements over several approaches relying on more standard representations.