Protecting vital public health programs with AI and Knowledge Graphs | Vanessa Lopez | KnowCon 2020

Health and social services are complex domains that have a direct impact on people's lives and where vast amounts of money are spent globally.

When funding intended for public health programs is lost to Fraud Waste and Abuse, vulnerable citizens are ultimately the victims. In challenging times, ensuring financial integrity and fairer distribution of services by reducing disparities are among the top priorities for healthcare systems.

In this talk, I will provide a perspective from my journey in adopting research in Knowledge Graphs and AI to address significant societal problems in the healthcare industry.

In particular, Knowledge Graphs emerged as a unifying technology that facilitates bringing diverse data sources together to unlock new knowledge and empower professionals to reduce healthcare disparities.

Through a combination of natural language understanding, deep learning, and knowledge representation for modelling human-expertise and reasoning, we are investigating unique functionalities to automatically extract actionable knowledge from large text policy documents.

We identify medical claims that infringe policy, either intentionally (fraudulent) or unintentionally (e.g., providing unnecessary services or inconsistent with accepted medical practices).

We aim to understand the social program levers that drive positive health.

---

Vanessa Lopez: Research Scientist and Manager, AI for Health and Social Care, IBM Research - Ireland

Vanessa's research interests are to investigate and envision technologies to better understand human needs and support us, as a society, to target complex problems in the health and social care domain. In particular using a combination of semantic, natural language and learning technologies to capture, integrate, search and query diverse data, and apply it to solve real challenges, like for Integrated Care, to support the care of the most vulnerable citizens and to ultimately obtain better outcomes

Vanessa Lopez is a researcher scientist at IBM Research Ireland since 2012 and manager of the AI for Health and Social Care team. Her research combines knowledge representation, semantics, natural language and learning technologies to create applications to support healthcare professionals improve the delivery of care for the most vulnerable, reduce healthcare disparities and protect the integrity of vital public health programs, this work is currently shortlisted for 2020 US-Ireland Innovation award from the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy.

Prior to that she was a researcher at KMI, Open University, where she pioneered research on Question Answering systems over the Semantic Web and obtained her PhD. She graduated with a master’s degree in computer engineering from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Over the years, she has participated actively in the Semantic Web community and co-authored more than 50 publications in high impact conference and journals, with over 3500 citations.

---

Connected Data London 2024 has been announced!

December 11-13, etc Venues St. Paul’s, City of London

If you liked this video, check #CDL24 for more Presentations, Keynotes, Masterclasses, and Workshops on cutting-edge topics from industry leaders and innovators:

https://connected-data.london