It's an exciting time to be an NLPer. Advances in algorithms, methods and data have enabled a wide range of advances in our community. These advances have meant that many tasks, once considered too experimental for production systems, are now used by millions of people worldwide. You can talk to your smart phones, translate websites in dozens of languages, and ask complex questions to home voice assistants. However, advances of NLP go beyond these applications. In this talk, I will present opportunities for us to apply these advances to improve both public health and medicine. I will discuss my recent work in this area, as well as new emerging opportunities for the field.
Mark Dredze is the John C Malone Associate Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is affiliated with the Applied Physics Laboratories, the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, the Center for Language and Speech Processing, among others. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Health Sciences Informatics in the School of Medicine. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.
Prof. Dredze’s research develops statistical models of language with applications to social media analysis, public health and clinical informatics. Within Natural Language Processing he focuses on statistical methods for information extraction but has considered a wide range of NLP tasks, including syntax, semantics, sentiment and spoke language processing. His work in public health includes tobacco control, vaccination, infectious disease surveillance, mental health, drug use, and gun violence prevention. He also develops new methods for clinical NLP on medical records.
Beyond publications in core areas of computer science, Prof. Dredze has pioneered new applications in public health informatics. He has published widely in health journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (AJPM), Vaccine, and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). His work is regularly covered by major media outlets, including NPR, the New York Times and CNN.