On a recent episode of "What's the Big Idea," Deric Kenne, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Public Policy and Health rode along through campus with Kent State University President, Todd Diacon, and introduced the Northeast Ohio Tri-County Prevention Infrastructure Project (Tri-C Project), the Center's latest development in substance abuse prevention.
The Tri-C project’s goal is to develop an infrastructure to monitor substance use and detect emerging trends in Geauga, Lake, and Portage counties so that prevention agencies can use the data to guide their efforts.
The Center and the College of Public Health, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science, received a $1.5 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to develop the Tri-C project. In the video, President Diacon interviews Dr. Kenne and collaborator Ruoming Jin, Ph.D., professor of Computer Science, to discuss the project’s innovative design. The project will take a novel approach to substance use prevention by integrating both online social media and offline geospatial data to monitor trends in substance use in each county.
"The goal of the project is to collect data from social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, using deep learning, natural language processing, and data mining to detect substance use,” explains Kenne, “the near real-time system will help guide community agencies in the three counties in developing prevention initiatives and programming.”
To learn more about the Tri-C project, please visit our website and follow CPPH on social media for updates.