NLP tales in Biomedicine + Markov model poetry

Dear All,

Very excited about the two presentations at this upcoming Meetup. Here are more details about the first one by Anna Divoli, PhD:

"Mining text to answer biomedical questions is a fascinating applied research area. The biomedical domain is one of the first 'big data' domains. It attracts people from the domain itself passionate to answer pressing scientific questions as well as computer scientists and linguists who see a domain with great standards, resources and numerous applications.During this talk I will give you a brief overview of different NLP problems in the biomedical domain and I'll make comparisons to mainstream NLP applications (e.g., search) and other, more commercial domains (e.g., voice of customer). My aim is to introduce you to a domain with state of the art solutions, free high-quality resources and well developed methodologies. If I inspire anyone to work on challenging biomedical problems, will be a bonus!"

Speaker's Bio: Anna entered the world of biomedical text mining as a domain expert (BSc in Biomedical Sciences & MSc in Biosystems and Informatics). For her doctoral research, she studied sentence extraction for semi-automatic annotation of biological databases at the University of Manchester. After her PhD, she carried out postdoctoral research, first in user search interfaces in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and then in knowledge acquisition on cancer metastasis from expert opinions in the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on developing methodologies for acquiring knowledge from textual data and studying the effect of human factors in that process. Anna joined Pingar in 2011 and is currently heading the Research & Development team.

The second presentation is going to be by Alex Raichev, who will give an introduction into Markov models and tell us how he used them to create real publishable poetry.

Hope you all can make it!

Alyona