I’ve recently returned from IEEE VIS 2015, which was held in Chicago October 25-30. VACLab research was visible in multiple ways during the conference. First, a poster authored by David Gotz and Shun Sun was presented at the 2015 Visual Analytics in Healthcare Workshop which was hosted by IEEE VIS this year. In addition to the poster, a live demonstration of the system was given to workshop attendees. More information about the poster can be found here.
I’m excited to share that my collaborative proposal to the NSF to study “Interactive Ensemble clustering for mixed data with application to mood disorders” has been funded. The project officially began September 15, 2015 with funding for one year. This is a planning proposal, with the intent to foster preliminary work toward a larger funded effort in subsequent years.
Here is the official NSF abstract for our project:
The Big Data era has given rise to data of unprecedented size and complexity.
The American Medical Informatics Association, AMIA, announced in July the creating of a new Working Group focused on the topic of Visual Analytics. To quote AMIA, “AMIA Working Groups serve as networks in which current members can exchange information on a particular area of special interest in biomedical and health informatics. Working Groups provide a way for members old and new to collaborate, meet new colleagues and become involved in the development of positions, issues, white papers, programs, and other activities that benefit the informatics community.
VAHC 2015 will return to IEEE VIS, the conference that hosted the very first workshop back in 2010. The workshop will take place in late October in Chicago, Illinois.
The 6th Annual VAHC marks the start of what we hope is an alternating schedule where the workshop will move back and forth between IEEE VIS and AMIA. This year is also an important year because VAHC papers will now be officially archived through the ACM Digital Library.
My team at UNC has won a T32 grant from NIH in the first round of BD2K Training Grant Award program. The five year grant, with Michael Kosorok and Gregory Forest as PIs, will fund predoctoral students focusing on biomedical Big Data challenges. The PIs will direct the program that spans 11 UNC departments and 4 schools at the University: Public Health, Pharmacy, Arts and Sciences, and my own School of Information and Library Science.
My latest article, in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE TVCG), has been published online and is available via the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The paper was written with collaborators Nan Cao (IBM Research) and Yu-Ru Lin (Pittsburgh) and describes the UnTangle visualization technique for probabilistic multi-label data. It is a followup to our recent ICDM paper, providing more details about the approach and new algorithms that produce improved results.
I’ve been awarded an Amazon AWS Education and Research Grant to support my visual analytics research. The grant provides credits for AWS services that will allow my lab to test algorithms at scale using EC2’s on-demand computing and the S3 storage service. Thank you to Amazon for supporting academic research and educational activities.
In the latest issue of Science (April 10, 2015; Vol 348 Issue 6231), my colleague Anne-Marie Meyer and I write about issues of data privacy in the “Big Data” era and the impact of privacy policy on science. In particular, we argue that the popular push for anonymization—a natural response to high profile data breaches and ethically questionable business practices—could result in failed policy on two fronts. First, ongoing research continues to show that even advanced anonymization practices fail to protect against individual identification.
I’ve co-authored a chapter titled Visual Analytics in Healthcare in a new book that is now available for pre-order from CRC Press. The book, Healthcare Data Analytics, is edited by Chandan Reddy and Charu Aggarwal. It explores a variety of data analytics topics in the context of the healthcare domain, broadly defined. Topics in the book range from EHRs, to NLP, to image and signal analysis, to genomics. The chapter that I wrote, along with Jesus Caban and Annie Chen, focuses specifically on applications of visual analytics methods.
I’m excited to share the news that the JAMIA Special Issue on Visual Analytics in Healthcare has been published. The entire issue–Volume 22, Issue 2, 01 March 2014–is available online via JAMIA’s publisher, Oxford University Press.
I served as guest editor, along with my friend and longtime VAHC colleague Jesus Caban, for this exciting issue. It captures a broad sampling of the very interesting work applying data visualization techniques and principles to the challenges of medical informatics.