Thurs @10am: A great opportunity for those interested in Big Data

Post date: Mar 19, 2014 3:26:27 PM

Jimeng Sun will be giving a talk on Thursday, March 20 from 10:00 – 11:30 in Gates 6115.

The title of his talk is “Do it once, do it right – Building a Scalable Predictive Modeling Platform for Biomedical Research.” Email me if you plan to leave class early to attend.

Abstract:

Predictive modeling plays an important role in modern biomedical research. Thanks to the explosion of Electronic Heart Records (EHR), the interest of clinical predictive models have skyrocketed in recent years. However, the methodologies for develop a predictive model are still labor intensive and ad-hoc. Such rudimentary approaches have hindered the quality and throughput of biomedical research.

In this talk, we promote a holistic approach that combines 1) system building, 2) algorithm research and 3) application development is the key. We believe such a specialized big-data platform that can significantly speedup the development of robust and accurate predictive models for biomedical research. We will present specific examples in these three aspects:

System: I introduce PARAMO, a parallel predictive modeling platform for enabling large scale model exploration on big data;

Applications: I present two use cases that can benefit from PARAMO, namely, 1) hypertension control transition prediction and 2) heart failure onset prediction.

Algorithm: I describe our work on unsupervised high-throughput phenotyping from EHR using a nonnegative tensor factorization algorithm.

Bio:

Jimeng Sun is an Associate Professor of School of Computational Science and Engineering at College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on medical informatics, especially in applying large-scale predictive modeling and similarity analytics on biomedical applications.

Dr. Sun has extensive research records on data mining: big data analytics, similarity metric learning, social network analysis, predictive modeling, tensor analysis, and visual analytics. He also applies data mining to healthcare applications such as heart failure onset prediction and hypertension control management.

He has published over 70 papers, filed over 20 patents (5 granted). He has received ICDM best research paper in 2008, SDM best research paper in 2007, and KDD Dissertation runner-up award in 2008. Dr. Sun received his B.S. and M.Phil. in Computer Science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2002 and 2003, and PhD in Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University in 2007. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, He was a research staff member at IBM TJ Watson Research Center.