Karin Verspoor - AI for biomedical evidence detection, search, synthesis, and discovery

Talk Title:
AI for biomedical evidence detection, search, synthesis, and discovery

Date/Time:
Thursday, March 9th, 2023 at 6:00pm

Affiliation:
Dean of School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia

Bio:
Professor Karin Verspoor is Executive Dean of the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health, and a 2021 “Brilliant Woman in Digital Health”. She was also selected as a finalist in the Women in AI Australia/New Zealand Awards 2022 for “AI in Innovation”. Karin is passionate about using data and AI to improve health outcomes for people. Her work has a specific emphasis on the use of natural language processing to transform unstructured data in biomedicine, ranging from scientific literature to clinical texts, into actionable information.

Abstract:
A wealth of information relevant to biomedicine exists in the textual resources of scientific literature, clinical notes or reports, and even patents. As largely natural language data intended for human communication rather than structured data representation, it can be challenging to work with. However, tasks ranging from systematic reviews to protein function prediction to hypothesis generation can benefit from organisation, mining, and modelling of these resources. In this talk, I will describe a body of work based on developing artificial intelligence and natural language processing methods for structuring of key information described in textual resources, and the use of these methods in a range of bio- and biomedical-informatics applications.

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Introductory Speaker:
Andrew Galbraith (MSc Student, Dr. Steven Jones Lab, University of British Columbia)

Talk Title:
Genome-Wide Detection of DNA Hydroxymethylation in Various Cancer Types Using Nanopore Sequencing

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VanBUG (Vancouver Bioinformatics Users Group) is an association of researchers, other professionals and students in the B.C. Lower Mainland who have an interest in the field of bioinformatics.

VanBUG meets on the third Thursday of every month from September through April. Research presentations by bioinformatics leaders, students and industry representatives are followed by networking over pizza and refreshments.

Meetings are held in the St. Paul's Hospital Site: Cullen Room (SPH1477) at 6:00 pm and are free and open to all.