News and Events
Congratulations for the Phd stipend from the PhD Visiting Program 2023 from Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) at the University of Chile, (Universidad de Chile) in Santiago, Chile. This will make it possible for Thomas Vakili to visit the center during three months the fall of 2023 and work with privacy preserving methods for Chilean patient records jointly with Dr. Jocelyn Dunstan that invited Thomas.
Professor Hercules Dalianis and I got a paper about the privacy preserving qualities of BERT accepted to the AAAI Fall Symposium on Human Partnership with Medical Artificial Intelligence! The paper is titled Are Clinical BERT Models Privacy Preserving? The Difficulty of Extracting Patient-Condition Associations. Our results strongly suggest that BERT’s poor generative capabilities makes it resistant to training data extraction attacks. Other models, such as GPT-2, have been shown to be susceptible to these attacks. From a privacy perspective, being a poor generator may be a feature!
Later in the same week, I flew from Stockholm to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic to participate at EMNLP 2021. Almost 500 participants were there, with the total number of participants exceeding 4,000. There were many interesting presentations regarding NLP in general, but also some that were specifically about the privacy aspects of NLP. It was a great experience to learn where the field is headed and also to get to know many talented researchers. I have written a summary of some of the interesting papers – reach out if you are interested in it.
Professor Hercules Dalianis, Sonja Remmer and myself represented DSV at the First ClinCode Conference. The conference gathered experts in medicine and computer science from across the Nordics and took place at the University Hospital of North Norway (UNN) in Tromsø.
The conference was chaired by Hercules, who is also a guest professor at the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research. Sonja shared her work on automatic ICD-10 classification using BERT and I spoke about the difficulty of extracting training data from clinical BERT models.
Several participants had an industry or medical background. This provided valuable insights into how our research at DSV may be used in practice and what challenges are most important. It also highlighted the great potential that can be unlocked by continuing to investigate ICD-10 classification and other medical NLP problems.
Many excellent ideas were hatched in the discussions, and it was lovely to visit the beautiful polar city of Tromsø. Personally, I really look forward to future iterations of the conference!
Information Systems unit at DSV will been the host for three months (March-June, 2019) of Beatriz Gómez Suárez from University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Beatriz is a PhD student in the research group “Architecture and performance of computer and communication systems” at UIB. The purpose of Beatriz’s visit is to collaborate in research with IT Management and Governance group lead by Professor Lazar Rusu concerning IT governance and digital transformation.
Information Systems unit at DSV will been the host for one month (January 22-February 22, 2018) of Odirlei Antonio Magnagnagno from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil. Odirlei Antonio Magnagnagno is a PhD student in the research group of Professor Edimara Mezzomo Luciano at Business School at PUCRS. The purpose of Odirlei’s visit is to collaborate in research with IT Management and Governance group lead by Professor Lazar Rusu concerning the role of digital governance in an attempt to reduce levels of corruption in public organizations in Brazil.
Researchers of IS Unit visited OMiLAB – research group of Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis at Institute Computer Science and Business Informatics, at the University of Vienna, Austria and BOC AG. Discussions on using ADOxx tool for 4EM, Capability Driven Development, and future of modeling.
Rebecka and Hercules participated in this years edition of ALTA at Monash University in Melbourne on the 5th to the 7th of December 2016. Rebecka gave a presentation on text mining of pathology reports and Hercules gave an invited talk with the title HEALTH BANK: A Workbench for Data Science Applications in Healthcare. ALTA included presentations, tutorials and a poster session. A short report summarizing selected papers is available on request.
Following the conference, we travelled to Brisbane for a visit at the CSIRO Australian e-Health Research Centre (AeHRC). There we met with Dr Anthony Nguyen who is the leader for the Health Data Semantics group. The meeting included discussions on some of the very interesting reserach performed by the group and a talk by Hercules on Detect HAI – Healthcare associated infection detection.
Hercules giving his talk at ALTA
Hercules and Anthony at AeHRC
Visiting AeHRC
Beautiful Brisbane