Important Dates

Submission Deadline: 
11 Nov 2016
Notification to Authors:  
5 Dec 2016 
Workshop date: 
10 Feb 2017

Venue





Open Call: Special thematic issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research on Mining Online Health Reports
Deadline for submissions June 15th 2017. 
See [pdf of CFP][link to JMIR announcement]






Update: Congratulations to Chris Norval and Tristan Henderson for the best paper award for their work on Contextual Consent: Ethical Mining of Social Media for Health Research
Update:  Programme now online - we welcome your registration to attend.  Note: late registration finishes on February 2nd (Workshop days only, e.g. 350 USD for ACM members / 300 USD for students).
Update: Invited talks from Elad Yom-Tov (Microsoft Research), Munmun DeChoudhury (Georgia Tech) and Daniel O'Connor (Wellcome Trust)
Update: Special Issue of selected workshop papers in the Journal of Medical Internet Research

Online health information is widely published by individuals in social media, chat rooms and discussion boards. At the same time search query logs and various forms of text messaging contain a vast amount of textual information that can be directly or indirectly linked to health conditions. This informal evidence about our individual health, attitudes and behaviours has the potential to be a valuable source for health applications ranging from real-time disease monitoring, to prioritising victim responses during disasters and detecting novel applications for drugs. Informal patient data on the Web is increasing, accessible, low cost, real-time and seems likely to cover a significant proportion of the population. Coupled with wearable body sensor data and the wealth of structured hospital data, it has the potential to offer insights leading to new lines of clinical investigation. However, in order to understand and integrate this data, researchers in academia and industry must grapple with theoretical, practical and ethical challenges that require immediate attention. For example: How can we achieve fine-grained analysis and understanding of health language? How can we better engage with health experts to assure relevance? How can we assess the impact of online health data in real-world health applications? How can we integrate online health data with other data sources such as databases and ontologies? and, What are the legal issues and privacy trade-offs around the use of online health data? 

This workshop (co-located with the 10th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining) aims to bring together a cross-disciplinary audience of researchers from academia, industry and the health sector to share experience of techniques, resources and best practices, to exchange perspectives and prioritise future directions. We expect the workshop to develop a community of interested researchers, build future collaborations and develop understanding of best practice, e.g. with respect to ethical standards.