We are very happy that Dina Demner-Fushman will give an invited talk in the ninth BioASQ workshop.
Title: "Challenges in answering COVID-19 pandemic questions"
Speaker: Dina Demner-Fushman, Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, NLM
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic caused concerns that were often expressed as questions asked by the public, clinicians, researchers, and policy makers. Although unprecedented amounts of information provided by scientific community and social media were becoming available, finding relevant information under the rapidly changing conditions proved to be difficult. The research community self-organized around several community-wide challenges to develop new approaches to pandemic information retrieval and question answering. This talk will discuss different aspects of pandemic question answering challenges, such as contrasting the answers for the experts and the public, as well as determining veracity of the answers.
Biosketch: Dina Demner-Fushman is an Investigator at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, NLM in the areas of Information Extraction for Clinical Decision Support, EMR Database Research and Development, and Image and Text Indexing for Clinical Decision Support and Education. The outgrowths of these projects are the evidence-based decision support system in use at the NIH Clinical Center since 2009, an image retrieval engine, Open-i, launched in 2012, and an automatic question answering service. Dr. Demner-Fushman earned her doctor of medicine degree from Kazan State Medical Institute in 1980, and clinical research Doctorate (PhD) in Medical Science degree from Moscow Medical and Stomatological Institute in 1989. She earned her MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003 and 2006, respectively. She earned her BA in Computer Science from Hunter College, CUNY in 2000. She is the author of more than 200 articles and book chapters in the fields of information retrieval, natural language processing, and biomedical and clinical informatics. Dr. Demner-Fushman is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and a founding member of the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on biomedical natural language processing.
