Jimeng Sun (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Predictive modeling plays an important role in biomedical research. Thanks to the explosion of Electronic Heart Records (EHR), the interest of building predictive models using EHR data has 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 healthcare and biomedical research.

In this talk, we promote a holistic approach that combines 1) algorithm development and 2) system building. We believe such a specialized big-data platform can significantly speedup the development of robust and accurate predictive models for biomedical research. I will present different projects covering both aspects:

Algorithms: I will first describe our work on computational phenotyping from EHR using sparse tensor factorization; then I will present patient similarity method using supervised distance metric learning system. Finally I will introduce a parallel predictive modeling platform using Hadoop for enabling parallel model exploration on big data.

Bio:
Jimeng Sun is an Associate Professor of School of Computational Science and Engineering at College of Computing in Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a research staff member at IBM TJ Watson Research Center. His research focuses on health analytics using electronic health records and data mining, especially in designing novel tensor analysis and similarity learning methods and developing large-scale predictive modeling systems. Dr. Sun has worked on various healthcare applications such as computational phenotyping from electronic health records, heart failure onset prediction and hypertension control management. He has collaborated with many healthcare institutions including Vanderbilt university medical center, Children's healthcare of Atlanta, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Geisinger Health System and Sutter Health. He has published over 70 papers, filed over 20 patents (5 granted). He has received ICDM best research paper award in 2008, SDM best research paper award 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 from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007.