CIS Department Talk - February 28, 2008

The Department of Computer and Information Science & The Society of Computer Science Present

Speaker:	Dr. Hyoil Han, Derexek University
Topic:	BioMedical Text Understanding
Date:	February 28, 2007 at 9:45AM
Place:	John Mulcahy Hall, Room 403

The World Wide Web made it possible for people and organizations to create and publish their work on the Web and in other electronic data sources, creating a massive amount of information. Manually searching for and processing such an abundant amount of data is not plausible. For example, biomedical researchers search for articles wusing PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that contains over 16 million articles. This number is expected to increase at a rate of over 500,000 citations annually. A simple keyword query on PubMed may return over 10,000 responces. While a search may return relevant results, the sheer quantity of citation takes a tremendous amount of time to review and may prevent the researchers from discovering significant scientific information. To improve such a relatively hostile online research enviroment, we are working to build an intelligent system to identify/annotate biomedical concepts and summarize biomedical articles. The main idea for the system is to develope theories and algorithms of narutal language understanding and information retrieval based on concepts rather than terms, such as concept identification/annotation and concept frequencies in the articles. The potential impact of using the outcomes of our research includes: (a) making new services, such as question answering and reasining via concept annotation and text summarization, easily achievable, and (b) making information extraction from unstructured data applicable to other domains via the adaptive techniques of annotation and summarization.

Hyoil Han is an Assistant Professor at Dexel University. She obtained an MS Degree from Koorea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). She then worked for the Samsung Electronics and Korea Telecom before obtaining a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2002. Her research areas lie in the merging of techiques from the fields of database (DB) and artificial intelligence (AI) and applying the new combined techniques to biomedical informatics and the Semantic Web with an emphasis on text/data mining and data intergration/managment. She has published over 30 papers in refereed literature.