The research team of Computer Science Professor Chen Li, along with Ph.D. students Qiushi Bai and Yicong Huang, has developed a website called CoronavirusTwitterMap to support interactive visualization and analytics of coronavirus-related tweets in real time. The team started collecting tweets related to COVID-19 in January, and they plan to further improve the system by adding more information such as case numbers of different regions, and certain sentiments of the public as shown on social media. “We hope this website can help people easily visualize and analyze social media tweets temporally and geographically in real time so that we understand how the public is responding to the Coronavirus pandemic,” says Li.

TwitterMap is a research prototype powered by Cloudberry and Apache AsterixDB to support interactive analytics and visualization of large amounts of tweets.