Sumithra Velupillai traveled to the northeastern US coast on February 18-21 for two research visits. In New York, she visited Noemie Elhadad and her group at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, and in Boston, she visited Guergana Savova and her group at the Natural Language Processing Lab, Childrens Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. Sumithra gave a talk on both occasions describing her past and ongoing research, as well as current research projects in the Clinical Text Mining group at DSV.
Noemie and Guergana are both part of the ongoing ShARe (Sharing Annotated Resources) project. Data from the ShARe project is used in this year’s ShARe/CLEFeHealth Evaluation Lab 2014’s Task 2 on information extraction (disease/disorder template filling), which Sumithra is co-leading together with Danielle Mowery. Guergana is also one of the main researchers in the Temporal Histories of Your Medical Event (THYME) project, a project very relevant to Sumithra’s current postdoctoral research. During these visits, Sumithra learned a lot from the extensive experience in the area of applying natural language processing technologies to clinical documentation that these two groups have, which hopefully will lead to further future collaborations.
These visits were part of Sumithra’s international postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Swedish Research Council and in part by the Swedish Fulbright Commission.