Seminar: Consumer Health Information Searching: Interface Design and Personalization Techniques

Nov 4, 2011 12:00 AM

Seminar Presentation

Javed Mostapha, MA, PhD
Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Location: HSEB 4100B
Date: Nov. 10, 2011
Time: 4:15 pm

Abstract

Searching for health information is the third most frequent use of the web according to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Unfortunately, the web typically offers a confusing collection of results when a user attempts to look for health information. Most search engines do not employ vocabularies consistently in their representations of web content -- they aggregate and index whatever is encountered during their crawls. In this talk, I will discuss two projects that are exploring ways to improve health information seeking: 1) An interface that employs visualization to support navigation and retrieval of cancer related information and 2) A more general consumer health information system that learns from interactions with its users and can support personalized delivery of health information. I will also discuss security and privacy protection measures and a new architecture for supporting the underlying transmission of sensitive health information.

Bio

Javed is the Director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program (chip.unc.edu) and the Laboratory of Applied Informatics Research (lair.unc.edu). His research concentrates on information retrieval problems particularly related to search and user-system interactions in large-scale document/data repositories.  He also serves as the Director of the Biomedical Informatics Core at the NC Translational Clinical Sciences Institute (tracs.unc.edu) and has current research engagements in biomedical data mining, analysis, and visualization. Translating scientific advances into health care improvements is a passion for Javed, and based on support from the TraCS Institute he has recently co-founded a company concentrating on patient-centric decision support (keonahealth.com).  At Carolina, Javed holds a joint faculty position in information science in the School of Information and Library Science and in the Biomedical Research Imaging Center in the School of Medicine.