Hello! My name is Thomas Vakili and I am a new PhD student here at DSV in the IS unit. I will be working on NLP and de-identification of medical records with Professor Hercules Dalianis as my supervisor.
I have a MSc in computer science (civ.ing. i datateknik) from KTH, with a specialization in NLP. Before joining you here at DSV, I was employed as a IT consultant working with back-end development, data engineering and machine learning.
I’m looking forward to get to know you all and I am excited to embark on this journey!
The Workshop NLP: mining clinical notes in EHR systems in Tromsø
Hercules and I recently had the opportunity to attend and present at a workshop in clinical text mining on March 10 in Tromsø. The workshop NLP: mining clinical notes was arranged by The Norwegian Center for E-health Research.
During the workshop, Hercules gave a presentation on why NLP is needed. I gave a presentation on De-identification of text in electronic health records, and the Stockholm University master student Synnøve Bråten presented her current master thesis work on creating a synthetic Norwegian reference standard for de-identification. Sumithra Velupillai and Natalia Viani, from King’s College London, presented different NLP problems for clinical research and how to set up a clinical NLP research study.
Maria Bampa, new employee
Hej I am Maria!
I have been working as a research assistant, here at the Department of Computer and System Sciences at Stockholm University since April 2019 jointly at IS unit and at SAS unit. I am working on a project until the end of August, for the prediction of adverse drug events utilizing data from electronic health records and my supervisors are Panos Papapetrou and Hercules Dalianis.
I have a Master’s in Health Informatics where I was introduced to various courses concerning tools, standardization and data science for health informatics. During my undergraduate studies at Athens University of Economics and Business, I was introduced to Computer Science and Information Systems and their managerial applications. I gained a firm footing on Information Technology by attending various courses like Programming in several languages, Mathematics, Databases, and Theoretical Computer Science.
My time here at DSV has been great and fun, working with well educated and knowledgeable people!
Hanna Berg, new employee
Hi! 
My name is Hanna Berg and I have been working here at DSV as a programmer/research assistant in the Clinical Text Mining Group since April. Together with Hercules Dalianis I am working in a project about de-identification and pseudonymization of patient health information in medical records. I will be working here until December.
My background is partly in linguistics, medicine and psychology from the Speech and Language Pathology Programme at Karolinska Institute, and partly in computer science from my time as a student here at DSV.
I have already met a lot of nice people and and getting to know all of you better!
Mahbub Ul Alam, A new employee
Hello everyone! I hope you all are having a lovely time. 🙂
I am Mahbub Ul Alam. I’ve recently started as a PhD student here at DSV.
My research interest is in ‘Cognitive internet of things (IoT) based smart health-care systems using deep learning and advanced machine learning’.
Potential research problem areas include:
1. Machine learning framework for IoT.
2. Intelligent data, i.e., machine-understandable, resource-recognition, knowledge representation, big data, deep learning, and advanced machine learning.
3. Clinical decision support systems in health-IoT.
4. Patient-centric personalized health-care systems and applications.
5. Distributed intelligent data processing in IoT.
I have a master’s degree at the Institute of Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart, Germany. In my master’s thesis, I worked to understand the hidden layer mechanisms of deep neural networks in natural language processing (automatic speech recognition) domain.
I have a bit of work experience in software engineering at Samsung Research and Development Institute Bangladesh.
I believe in diversity, and love to explore new and fresh technological innovations. I like to think that every aspect of my previous experiences is helping me to move forward for my future career. I always keep in mind that, the central principle of my life is ‘Let all of us prosper together.’
The people are super nice and friendly here, and I am looking forward to working together with all of you at DSV.
Let all of us prosper together. 🙂
Mahbub
Mahbub Ul Alam
Rebecka Weegar, new employee
My name is Rebecka Weegar and I’ve recently started as a PhD student in the Clinical Text Mining Group here at DSV. My supervisors are professor Hercules Dalianis at DSV and professor Søren Brunak at DTU, Technical University of Denmark.
My area will be text mining, and my aim is to find cancer symptoms and comorbidities in electronic patient records. My first focus will be to identify symptoms and patterns in patients diagnosed with cervical cancer.
I have an MSc (civ.ing.) in software engineering from Lund University/Lunds Tekniska Högskola, where I wrote my master thesis in natural language processing. I got my degree in the fall of 2014.
I have already met a lot of nice people here, and I am looking forward to working together with all of you at DSV.
Rebecka
Claudia Ehrentraut – new employee
Hi!
Even though it has been a month since I started working here, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself to everyone at DSV. I am working as a research engineer in the Clinical Text Mining Group led by Hercules Dalianis. My current research covers Language Technology and Health Informatics in general and the Detection of Hospital Acquired Infections in particular.
My background is in Language Technology and Linguistics. I obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Nordic Languages and Anthropology from the University of Freiburg and continued to study the Master’s program in Language Technology at Uppsala University, which I completed in spring 2013. I wrote my Master’s thesis at DSV, focusing on the detection of Hospital Acquired Infections in Swedish patient records using machine learning. My current work pursues the objective to optimize the initial results by applying new preprocessing methods and using a larger dataset.
I am looking forward to working with you and meeting everyone who I haven’t had the chance to talk to yet.
Claudia
Two newly appointed associate professors
Congratulations to our two newly appointed associate professors Jelena Zdravkovic and Åsa Smedberg both at IS-enheten, well done!
/Hercules