Researchers
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Hong Yu, PhD (Principal Investigator) Professor and Principal Investigator UMMS BioNLP Group, Dept of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell; Adjunct Professor, Dept of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School Worcester; College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Research Health Scientist, Center for Healthcare Organization & Implementation Research, Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital.
I am an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. I received PhD from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. My research focuses on information retrieval and natural language processing and their applications to the biomedical and healthcare domain. AskHERMES is one of the few online systems that provide answers to biomedical questions. NoteAid is a system that translates electronic medical record (EMR) notes to lay language comprehensible to patients. We also mine data from EMRs for healthcare outcome studies. |
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Abhyuday Narayan Jagannatha Research Assistant, School of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am a Ph.D. Student at UMass Amherst CS. I am currently working with Prof Hong Yu in UMass BioNLP group. I am a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. And I briefly worked at Samsung before joining UMass Amherst Computer Science. My work primarily involves using mathematical tools to model and understand text. To this end, I mainly work with approaches borrowed from Machine Learning and Optimization. Some of the current projects that I am involved in are "Simplification of EMR text using Machine Translation without using a parallel corpus", and "Adverse Drug event detection". Automated Simplification of Medical Narratives through machine translation is traditionally done using a parallel corpus of complex to simple sentences. But creation of such a parallel corpus is very expensive. This is why most efforts which work on this approach use a relatively small corpus. In our work we try to replace the need for a parallel corpus by leveraging upon the regularity of the language we are using. In our Adverse drug event project, we try to build pharmacovigilance tools which work on raw unstructured text from Medical Narratives. The goal is to have a system in place, which can detect events of Adverse drug event and then aggregate them over a large dataset to achieve meaningful information about the adverse reactions. |
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Rumeng Li Teaching and Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the College of Information and Computer Science. I am working with Professor Hong Yu in the Bio-NLP lab. My research interests are in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. I received my Master's Degree in Computer Science at Peking University, China. During which I interned at Professor Yuji Matsumoto's lab at Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan as a research assistant for one year working on natural language processing. I obtained BA in English Language and Literature from Beijing Sport University, China.
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Avijit Mitra Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the College of Information and Computer Science. I am working with Professor Hong Yu in the Bio-NLP lab. My research focuses on the investigation and development of robust NLP pipelines, specifically for the biomedical domain. Prior to joining UMass, I received my BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. |
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Zonghai Yao Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am a Ph.D. student in the College of Information and Computing Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am working with Prof. Hong Yu in the BioNLP Laboratory. My major research interests are natural language processing and related fields. I received my Master of Science in Computer Science from Universtiy of Massachusetts Amherst. |
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Sunjae Kwon Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am a MS/Ph.D. Student at UMASS Amherst CS. I am currently working with Prof. Hong Yu in UMass BioNLP group. I am a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science at Sogang University. Before joining UMass, I worked at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology as an AI research scientist.
I am interested in NLP and medical AI. I am involved in "Important Medical Jargon Terms Extraction with Various Medical Knowledge Resources." The goal of this project is to find difficult jargon terms from doctors' EHR notes. For this, rather than previous methodologies to rely on statistical inference to find the terms, we are trying to use pretrained language models. Specifically, we are trying to mask and decode medical terminologies to analyze which terms are more unfamiliar.
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Junda Wang Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the College of Information and Computer Science. I am working with Professor Hong Yu in the BioNLP lab. My research focuses on healthcare, Machine Learning and causal inference. I received my MS in Computer Science at University of Rochester and BA in Applied Mathematics from Hefei University of Technology, China.
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Hieu Tran Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am currently a Computer Science Ph.D. student at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I do research on Natural Language Processing with Prof. Hong Yu. Previously, I obtained my B.S. degree in Computer Science from Hanoi University of Science and Technology. My research explores mechanisms to understand human languages for computers so that computers can perform cognitive language related tasks for us. Among others, I am especially interested in distilling structured information and mining useful knowledge from massive human-written text of various domains. I am also interested in other language-related problems with deep learning, including reading comprehension, question answering, machine translation, and natural language generation.
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Rohan Pandey Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am an MS/PhD student at the Bio-NLP lab at the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences at UMass, Amherst. My current research interests have a strong focus on making machine learning systems more robust and reliable for read-world applications, particularly in healthcare. My research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical models and practical, deployable solutions in medical contexts. |
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Yifan Zhang Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
I am a Ph.D. student in the Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. I am currently working under the guidance of Professor Hong Yu in the Bio-NLP lab. I am interested in machine learning, natural language processing and healthcare. I received my MS in Computer Science at Brandeis University.
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Won Seok Jang Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
Hello I'm Won Seok. I am a Computer Science PhD student at the Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences at UMass Lowell. My background is nursing and I have also worked on medical data analysis during my masters at Yonsei University. My current research interest is pioneering new NLP methods for the medical field also applying analyzing medical data.
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Sharmin Sultana Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
I'm currently pursuing my MS/Ph.D. at the Richard A. Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Under the guidance of Professor Hong Yu, I'm engaged in research at the Bio-NLP lab, where we explore the intersections of NLP and Machine Learning within the healthcare sector. Before embarking on this journey at UMass Lowell, I earned my undergraduate degree in Computer Science from CUET in Bangladesh.
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Mingchen Li Research Assistant, College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
I am a PhD student at University of Massachusetts Amherst, advised by Professor Hong Yu. My core research pursuits center around the intersection of knowledge graphs and natural language processing. I am particularly fascinated by areas including information extraction, knowledge graph completion, question answering, zero-shot learning, and beyond.
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Postdoctoral Researcher |
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Feiyun Ouyang Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
I received PhD from the Department of Epidemiology and Medical Statistics at Central South University, China. I am now working with Professor Hong Yu in the Bio-NLP lab. My research focuses on the epidemiology and influential factors of mental health and cardiovascular diseases. |
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Research Staff |
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Weisong Liu Research Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
I received my PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I am interested in designing and building text mining systems using advanced NLP and data analysis tools. My experience includes information extraction, document search/retrieval, parallel computing, and clouding computing. I am currently involved in AskHERMES, ADE Repository, NoteAid, and FigureSearch projects. |
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Edgard Alex Granillo Health Outcome Associate, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Medical School
I am physician graduated from The Evangelist University of El Salvador, currently working with Dr. Yu's BioNLP (Biomedical Natural Language Processing) group in Biomedical and health informatics. Presently I am involved in a research project focusing in building pharmacovigilance tools with the aid of BioNLP to identify adverse drug events in electronic medical records. This project involves annotation of electronic health record narratives to aid machine learning for accurately recognition of medication use and their potential adverse effects. During the last several years I have also been involved as a part of my research career in multiple clinical and community base surveillance research studies focusing in prevention on cardiovascular heart disease, all these research projects funded by the National Institute of Health. Currently my research focus is in BioNLP and its applications to the biomedical and healthcare field |
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Minhwa Lee Research Staff, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
I am a research staff member at University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell), working under the guidance of Professor Hong Yu. I earned my Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from The College of Wooster, followed by a Master's degree in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2023-2024, I served as a visiting researcher at University of Minnesota Twin Cities. I'm interested in the areas of computational epidemiology and human-AI collaboration using large language models and interactive design frameworks.
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VA Staff |
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Emily Druhl
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Lay Language Dictionary Contributors |
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Alumni
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Administrative Kathryn Dennison, Project Administrator Sandra Stankus, Project Coordinator Carla McDonald, Administrative Assistant |
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