Research Summary

A full research summary is available here

Research Projects

1) Obvio: Semantic Web in Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) (2010.6 - present)
I will co-chair The First International Workshop on the role of Semantic Web in Literature-Based Discovery (SWLBD 2012) to be held in conjunction with the IEEE Bioinformatics and Biomedical Conference (BIBM 2012) in Philadelphia PA USA, Oct 4-7, 2012.

People
Delroy Cameron, Olivier Bodenreider, Thomas C. Rindflesch, Ramakanth Kavuluru. Pablo N. Mendes, Hima Yalamanchili, Tu Danh, Sreeram Vallabhaneni, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Project Page
http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/Obvio

Summary


Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) is characterized by uncovering hidden but novel information implicit in non-interacting literatures. The notion of LBD was first proposed by Don R. Swanson over two decades ago when he postulated that two concepts (A,C) may be logically related through some intermediate concept (B), common to seemingly disjoint literatures. This seminal idea has largely influenced efforts towards LBD automation in the biomedical domain and LBD continues to be an integral part of the evolution of biomedical science. Primarily, LBD has been instrumental in supplementing and guiding scientific experiments that lead to innovations in diagnosis, treatment and preventions mechanisms.

Much of the early LBD research however, relied almost entirely on Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, such as term and concept co-occurrence, to uncover unknown associations in the large volume of scientific literature now publicly available. Only recently has significant attention been devoted to semantics-based techniques that leverage Semantic Web technologies to exploit the meaning of associations between concepts to facilitate LBD. While generally more intuitive than IR techniques, the feasibility of semantics-based approaches has not been fully demonstrated. Many challenges still exist. This project addresses some of those challenges.


Publications
D. Cameron, O. Bodenreider, H. Yalamanchili, T. Danh, S. Vallabhaneni, K. Thirunarayan, A. P. Sheth, T. C. Rindflesch, A Graph-Based Decomposition of Swanson’s Hypothesis using Semantic Predications, Journal of Biomedical Informatics

D. Cameron, R. Kavuluru, O. Bodenreider, P. N. Mendes, A. P. Sheth, K. Thirunarayan, Semantic Predications for Complex Information Needs in Biomedical Literature, 5th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine BIBM2011, Atlanta GA, November 12-15, 2011

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2) PREDOSE: PREscription Drug abuse, Online-Surveillance and Epidemiology project (2011.7 - present)

People
Delroy Cameron, Lu Chen, Raminta Daniulaityte, Robert Carlson, Russel Falck, Amit P. Sheth, Matthan Sink (Kaustav Saha, Sujan Udayanga, Michael Cooney - former)

Project Page
http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/PREDOSE
http://www.med.wright.edu/citar/web-based-UGC

Summary
This research project aims to develop a mechanism to automate 'qualitative coding' in social research by automatically extracting triples from web data, particularly web forum posts. The goal of such triple extraction is to provide a framework that can be exploited to study user knowledge, attitudes and behaviors as it relates to non-medical use of pharmaceutical opiods (e.g. OxyContin, buprenorphine etc). Interesting areas include 1) Social Network analysis, intended to determine information diffusion patterns and 2) Spatial-Temporal-Thematic analysis, intended to determine trends within the community regarding usage, distribution, of method of administration of pharmaceutical opioids (including Suboxone and Subutex, which are buprenorphine products).

Publications
R. Daniulaityte, R. Carlson, R. Falck, D. Cameron, L. Chen, A. P. Sheth, Drug User Opinions About Extra-Medical Use of Loperamide: Application of Sentiment Analysis to Web Forum Data. 5th World Congress on Social Media, Mobile Apps, and Internet/Web 2.0 in Medicine and Public Health Medicine 2.0, Boston MA USA, September 15-16, 2012.

R. Daniulaityte, R. Carlson, R. Falck, D. Cameron, S. Udayanga, L. Chen, A. P. Sheth, A Web-Based Study of Self-Treatment of Opioid Withdrawal Symptoms with Loperamide. The College on Problems of Drug Dependence CPDD 2012, Palm Springs, CA USA, June 9-14, 2012.

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3) Scooner (2009.1 - 2010.6)
People
Ramakanth Kavuluru, Gary A. Smith, Paul Fultz II, Delroy Cameron, Pablo Mendes, Christopher Thomas, Wenbo Wang

Project Page
http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/Scooner

Summary
Scooner is a Semantic Browser that is a knowledge-driven, Text Exploration, Semantic Web application for knowledge discovery. It is based on the idea that humans performing search on a text corpus are in search of information, not so much documents. Hence, the browser is built on a data-centric view of information in corpora. It performs the following tasks: Document Indexing (using Lucene), Metadata Extraction (Named Entity & Relationship Identification), Spotting known entities in text, Annotating spotted entities, Supporting navigation of triples over a corpus (Semantic Browsing), Reranking and bookmarking results in the Workbench (Document Ranking), Saving and publishing search results.

Publications
D. Cameron, P. N. Mendes, A. P. Sheth, V. Chan, Semantics-Empowered Text Exploration for Knowledge Discovery, 48th ACM Southeast Conference, ACMSE2010, Oxford Mississippi, April 15-17, 2010

Demo
An online demo of the Semantic Browser is available here.

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4) SEMEF: SEMantic Expert Finder (2006.6 - 2007.12) M.S. Thesis Project
People
Delroy Cameron, Boanerges Aleman-Meza, I. Budak Arpinar, Sheron L. Decker

Summary
The expert finder project is aimed at finding experts to serve as program committee (PC) members for conferences, by estimating their expertise based on publication record and inexact expertise found through extrapolation, using a taxonomy of topics and subtopics across some domain.

Publications
D. Cameron, B. Aleman-Meza, I. B. Arpinar, S. L. Decker, A. P. Sheth, A Taxonomy-based Model for Expertise Extrapolation, 4th International Conference on Semantic Computing ICSC2010, Pittsburgh PA, September 22-24, 2010

B. Aleman-Meza, S. L. Decker, D. Cameron, I. B. Arpinar, Association Analytics for Network Connectivity in a Bibliographic and Expertise Dataset, Book Chapter in Semantic Web Engineering in the Knowledge Society, 2008 ()

D. Cameron, B. Aleman-Meza, I. B. Arpinar, Collecting Expertise of Researchers for Finding Relevant Experts in a Peer-Review Setting, 1st International ExpertFinder Workshop EFW 2007, (Co-located with 7th Knowledge Web General Assembly) Berlin Germany, January 16, 2007 () ()