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Dr. John Prager at RENCI
April 11, 2018 @ 6:00 am - 9:00 am
Dr. John Prager from IBM will be giving a talk at RENCI on Wednesday, April 11th. His talk will begin at 10am in Biltmore conference room followed by a Q&A session from 11-11:15am. There will be a short lunch break after the Q&A session followed by a group meeting at 11:45am in Biltmore for anyone interested. Additionally, we will be holding 30-min one-on-one meetings for those interested in meeting with John individually; please reach out to me directly to schedule a one-on-one meeting. Dr. Prager’s talk title and abstract as well as his bio are located below.
Talk Title: From Question Answering to Clinical Decision Support: Electronic Medical Record Analysis Activities in the Watson Lab
John M. Prager
IBM T.J. Watson Research Ctr.
Abstract: In this talk I will cover the recent work in the IBM Watson Lab as it evolved through a series of activities in the area of clinical decision support. I'll start with describing an adaptation of our question-answering system to answer medical licensing exam (USMLE) questions, progress through an intelligent search capability, to a dashboard presenting the clinician with information to support the treatment of a patient with minimal user input. Most of this work has been undertaken in the EMRA (Electronic Medical Record Analysis) project, and involves the development of several technologies for the analysis of medical text. These include extending the coverage of UMLS concepts and relations using knowledge of grammar, analogy and inference. I will end with a brief look at new work quantifying how much of an electronic medical record might actually be useful. If possible, I will give a demo of some of these applications.
Bio: Dr. John Prager has been working in technical fields related to using AI techniques to satisfy user information needs for most of his professional career. In his most recent role at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, he has been part of efforts to adapt Watson technology to healthcare and other domains. In the EMRA project, he has developed, or directed development of, applications in clinical decision support and invented components to extend NLP technology for the medical domain in general.
John was one of the original researchers on the Watson project, a system that played (and won) the Jeopardy! TV quiz-show game. He was involved in both the algorithms area, concentrating on question analysis and wordplay, and strategy. Previously, he led IBM’s successful entries in the TREC-QA tasks, an annual evaluation at NIST, and was co-PI on grants under the AQUAINT program. Prior to that, he worked in various areas of Search, including Language Identification, Web Search and Categorization. He has contributed components to the IBM Intelligent Miner for Text product. For a while in the early 90’s, he ran the search service on www.ibm.com, and in so doing invented a concept that later became known as the hashtag.
While at the IBM Cambridge (Mass.) Scientific Center, John was the project leader of the REASON (Real-time Explanation And SuggestiON) project; REASON would provide users help by taking natural-language questions and processing them with an inference engine tied to a large repository of facts and rules about network-wide resources. John has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Cambridge (England) and in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Massachusetts; his publications include conference and journal papers, seventeen patents, several book chapters and a book on Turing.
There will be a live stream of the talk at the Health Sciences Library, Room 227 starting at 10:00AM.