Through its Academic Data Grants program, Twitter provided their tweet datasets to various academic institutions. Prospective participating researchers were asked to submit a proposal via the Twitter Data Grants website. For the initial pilot, a small number of proposals were selected to receive free datasets via Gnip, Twitter's commercial data reseller partner. In addition to the data, selected institutions were also offered the opportunity to collaborate with Twitter engineers and researchers. An example of use cases of this initiative is when Twitter provided a collection of 2 billion tweets from May 2009 and October 2010 and 1.8 billion tweets collected from August 2011 to November 2012 to Johns Hopkins to track flu infections.