Seminar Presentation
Hong Yu, Ph.D.
Location: HSEB 4100B
Date: Apr. 26, 2012
Time: 4:15 pm
Abstract
Zettabytes of electronic data are generated each year. Such big data have fundamentally changed both biomedical research and healthcare practice. Informatics is playing a key role in this revolution. My group’s research involves developing innovative algorithms and tools for gathering, analyzing and interpreting heterogeneous data from multiple sources. These sources are both clinical and research related, such as electronic medical records (EMRs) and biomedical databases. We apply ontologies and leverage natural language processing, and create innovative data analysis and presentation systems that promote translational biomedical research. In this talk, I will describe a number of systems that we are developing, including Biomedical Figure Search, a figure language processing system for biomedical researchers and AskHERMES, a clinical question answering system for decision support. I will also describe the ADE repository, a large collaborative research effort to analyze adverse drug event information from the genomics data, the EMRs, and reports from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System.
Bio
Yu is a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University. She has over 14 years of research in biomedical natural language processing, and has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in leading biomedical informatics and computer science journals and conference proceedings. She has served as co-Chair in the NLP sections of the Pacific Symposium of Biocomputing and IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, and is the PI of several NIH-funded projects. She is one of the six “star trainees” selected by National Library of Medicine on its celebration of 175th anniversary. Her work is included as best paper in IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2011, described in “Translational Bioinformatics 2012 Year in Review” by Russ Altman, and featured in Science, Nature, BioInform, and the Pulitzer-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.