As members of The Swedish Research School of Management and IT (MIT) Edephonce Nfuka and I have participated between 5 to 7th October 2010 to the MIT seminar at Uppsala University. Here we have presented a research paper named “The effect of critical success factors on IT governance performance in the public sector organizations from a developing country: A case of Tanzania”. The paper has well been received and the comments we have got from the participants to this seminar will due to an improvement of our paper that has been targeted to be submitted for publication to a journal. The MIT seminar from this year was also an opportunity to attend different paper presentations and make constructive comments to the authors for the improvement of their papers. Moreover in the MIT seminar from Uppsala University we have attended three interesting lectures done by Professor John Kimberly from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. For more information about The Swedish Research School of Management and IT (MIT) please access the following link: http://www.mit.uu.se/
Third HEXAnord Meeting, Utö 22-24 September 2010
The third HEXAnord meeting took place on Utö in the Stockholm archipelago last week and was hosted by the IT for Health group at DSV.
HEXAnord is a network with participants from the Nordic (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway) and Baltic countries (Estonia and Lithuania). In addition to SU/DSV, there were representatives from Göteborgs universitet and Linköpings universitet. The participants from DSV were Hercules Dalianis, Martin Hassel, Gunnar Nilsson, Sumithra Velupillai, Maria Skeppstedt, Helen Allvin, Mia Kvist and I.
This time around the meeting was designed as a PhD training course (3 ECTS) for the 14 PhD students, with seminar talks given on SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms), how to build essential tools and resources for the clinical domain, the nature and problems of nursing documentation, as well as on applying machine learning on clinical text to provide decision support. An assignment was given to the students by each of the lecturers, which are to be completed in groups across the universities.
The next meeting will be held in Trondheim, Norway at the beginning of next year.
SISA – Svenska informationssystemsakademin
Idag hölls det första årsmötet för SISA – Svenska informationssytemsakademin. SISA är en förening för svenska universitet, högskolor och forskningsinstitutioner som arbetar med informationssystem. Informationssystem “är det vetenskapliga ämne som utvecklar kunskap om människors design och bruk av IT i individuella, organisatoriska och samhälleliga sammanhang. Inom denna ram finns vid svenska universitet och högskolor ett antal olika inriktningar.” Föreningen syftar till att samordna och uppmärksamma forskning och utbildning inom informationssystem.
Aron Henriksson, new employee
Hi!
I have been working full-time at DSV for a month now and would like to take the opportunity to introduce myself on the Syslab blog. I’m currently working on adapting the Web Mining course to a more distance-friendly form. I will also be involved in the research work of the “IT for Health” team, performing natural language processing on patient health records.
I have a BSc in computer science from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia and I just recently completed my Master’s degree from KTH and the EMIS program. In my thesis I explored the possibility of applying the automatic classification methods (corpus annotation and machine learning) used in the biomedical and clinical domain to that of knowledge management. More specifically, I wanted to find out whether it is possible to assess automatically the level of certainty in knowledge-intensive documents. Together with my supervisor, Sumithra Velupillai, the thesis was turned into a paper that was published and presented at a workshop (Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing) in Uppsala in July.
I look forward to getting to know you all more in the coming months!
Aron
Accepted paper "Multiple Help Online: An Integrated E-Health System for Stress Management"
Hélène Sandmark at the School of Health and Medical Sciences, Örebro University, and I have got a conference paper accepted at IADIS e-Health 2010. The conference is to be held in Freiburg, Germany, in late July. The paper is entitled “Multiple Help Online: An Integrated E-Health System for Stress Management”. Please see the paper abstract below.
In
working life of today, people experience high levels of stress and often react
strongly to different stressors. If one is exposed to high stress levels for a
long time, this may eventually lead to sickness and absence from work. Web
based systems are available today for people who suffer from stress. However,
these web based systems need to be further explored in order to meet different
‘on demand needs’ of people in stress. In order to offer people in stress a
broad palette of help and support, different forms of online help from both
health experts, peers and published material and exercise programs need to be
well integrated in the web based system. A system that offers multiple help online
can also let the users experience complemented advice and ideas regarding their
stress concerns. The web based stress management system proposed in this paper
outlines a combination of online interactions between health experts and people
in stress, community conversations among peers and published information and
exercises. The paper also introduces a set of design principles to be used to
guide the development of integrated online help for stress management.
Report from the LREC conference in Malta the 19th to 21st of May
Hercules Dalianis, Sumithra Velupillai and me (Elin Carlsson) participated in the the seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) that was held in Valletta, Malta 19-21 May 2010. The conference had approximately 1200 participants and about 600 out of 900 submissions were accepted.
We presented three different posters: Creating a Reusable English-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Bilingual Dictionary Construction; How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations; and Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records Written in Swedish. I attach our report from the conference (written in Swedish): LREC2010_notes_and_reflections.pdf
Sumithra and Hercules present their poster: How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations
Elin and Hercules present their poster: Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records
Written in Swedish.
Hercules and Elin after the poster session.
Microsoft Research Event – Enabling Innovation through Research
On the 5th of May, 2010, I visited Microsoft research lab in Cambridge, outside London, for their event on Enabling Innovation through Research. Microsoft Research Cambridge is one of six Microsoft research labs in the world. The event was introduced by a keynote speech given by Andrew Herbert, the managing director of the lab. It showed that they have a wide range of research areas spanning from disease modeling and advertisements to inference and cloud computing. The lunch break that followed combined eating, chatting and walking around among product solutions from different research projects. The researchers were present and they gave us the opportunity to engage in nice discussions on the different solutions and their future plans. There were examples of interactive systems for medical images and body part recognition, painting and auto photo collage tools, for example.
For more information about the research event, please visit:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/events/eitr/
In addition, Microsoft Research arranges summer schools for PhD students, and they also have PhD Scholarship Programmes and Research Fellowships. Supervisors of PhD students are welcome to nominate projects and PhD students for the summer schools and PhD scholarship programmes.
More general information can be found at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/cambridge/default.aspx
The agenda of this year’s summer school can be seen at:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/2010summerschool/
Nils Stadling, Microsoft, and I, at Microsoft Research Cambridge
Second HEXAnord Meeting, Åre 12-14 April 2010
12-14 April the IT for Health group at DSV arranged the second HEXAnord network meeting in Åre, Sweden. Apart from Hercules Dalianis, Sumithra Velupillai, Maria Skeppstedt, Elin Carlsson, Helen Allvin and me from DSV, there were participants from all participating countries (Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania) as well as visitors from Karolinska Institutet/KTH and Östra Sjukhuset, Västra Götalandsregionen.
The meeting consisted of seminars mainly on Machine Learning and Clinical Text together with work on the coming the 2nd Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents in L.A., June 5 2010. In conjunction to this work no less than three papers from the group, that had passed the double blind peer-review, were finalized.
Nine working groups were created for Intra Nordic cooperation dealing with Automated GTT-Global Trigger Tool, Visual Analytics, Requirements engineering, Release of Data, Negation detection, Decision making and reasoning processes, Characteristics of clinical texts, Compare clinical and general language and finally Comorbidity, all of them in the perspective of health text analysis.
On the agenda was also planning of the 3rd Louhi Workshop, probably to be held next year, as well as further planning for the PhD course to be held later this year.
See more photos below:
