Author: Elad Yom-Tov

Elad Yom-Tov is a computer scientist whose research uses online behavior, machine learning, and information retrieval to study public health. Crowdsourced Health explains how search queries, social-media activity, and other large-scale digital traces can reveal patterns relevant to medicine while also raising questions about privacy, consent, bias, and responsible intervention. The MIT Press published the book in 2016 under the fuller subtitle How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine. Yom-Tov has worked in industrial research at Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM Research Haifa, and Rafael, and later became a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University. His projects include detecting health concerns from user-generated content and testing carefully designed online messages intended to improve treatment adherence or encourage clinical attention. Crowdsourced Health connects that technical work with an accessible account of what population-level internet data can and cannot show, presenting digital epidemiology as a field that requires both computational skill and ethical restraint.