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Events for November 21, 2019

  • NL Seminar-Machine Reading for Precision Medicine

    Thu, Nov 21, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Hoifung Poon, MSR/UW

    Talk Title: Machine Reading for Precision Medicine

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: The advent of big data promises to revolutionize medicine by making it more personalized and effective, but big data also presents a grand challenge of information overload. For example, tumor sequencing has become routine in cancer treatment, yet interpreting the genomic data requires painstakingly curating knowledge from a vast biomedical literature, which grows by thousands of papers every day. Electronic medical records contain valuable information to speed up clinical trial recruitment and drug development, but curating such real world evidence from clinical notes can take hours for a single patient. NLP can play a key role in interpreting big data for precision medicine. In particular, machine reading can help unlock knowledge from text by substantially improving curation efficiency. However, standard supervised methods require labeled examples, which are expensive and time-consuming to produce at scale. In this talk, I'll present Project Hanover, where we overcome the annotation bottleneck by combining deep learning with probabilistic logic, and by exploiting self supervision from readily available resources such as ontologies and databases. This enables us to extract knowledge from millions of publications, reason efficiently with the resulting knowledge graph by learning neural embeddings of biomedical entities and relations, and apply the extracted knowledge and learned embeddings to supporting precision oncology.


    Biography: Hoifung Poon is the Director of Precision Health NLP at Microsoft Research and an affiliated professor at the University of Washington Medical School. He leads Project Hanover, with the overarching goal of advancing machine reading for precision health, by combining probabilistic logic with deep learning. He has given tutorials on this topic at top conferences such as the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence AAAI. His research spans a wide range of problems in machine learning and natural language processing NLP, and his prior work has been recognized with Best Paper Awards from premier venues such as the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics NAACL, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP, and Uncertainty in AI UAI. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Washington, specializing in machine learning and NLP.

    Host: Emily Sheng

    More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar

    Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/165124022

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Conf Rm #1014

    WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/165124022

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar

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  • Min Family Challenge: Engineering for a Sustainable Future Lunch & Learn Information Session

    Thu, Nov 21, 2019 @ 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations

    Workshops & Infosessions


    The Min Family Challenge (MFC) was created to empower future generations of engineers to use their acquired knowledge and leverage the power of technology to better the world by serving the least fortunate and their pressing societal needs. Inspired by The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, this year's challenge will support teams developing engineering solutions for a sustainable future. The grand prize winner will receive $50K to help launch their company!

    Interested participants should attend a special information session on Thursday, November 21 at 11:30 AM to learn about the current challenges in air and water quality in the local community. This is a great opportunity to begin thinking about how you can make a real difference! Individuals and teams can apply without an idea. You must apply by December 1, 2019, but your final team does not need to be formed until late January. The challenge is open to all USC students, however, a current Viterbi student must serve on each team. If you are outside of Viterbi, please come to the session to meet our students!

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Undergraduate Programs

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