Healthy People 2030 and the All of Us Program demonstrate how human health is influenced by factors beyond direct patient/physician interactions, sometimes referred to as the exposome. A prime example is the increasing number of chemicals humans are exposed to and their effect on our overall chemical load. Commonly used risk assessment methods do not scale quickly or easily to changing conditions, such as localized regulatory changes. In this talk, Professor Catherine Blake will describe an automated approach that combines semantics and sentence syntax to identify target outcomes for cancer risk assessments from chemical exposure. In contrast to prior methods, this system would change a user’s decision for 21 out of the 27 chemicals explored. She will also discuss how this approach can be used to characterize other factors in the exposome that impact cancer.
Catherine Blake is a professor in the School of Information Sciences and a Health Innovation Professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her work has produced new frameworks that inform decision-making from multiple streams of evidence, along with a series of language processing projects that automatically identify outcomes for breast cancer, comparison claims for diabetes, and to scale up evidence-based chemical risk-assessments. She is affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where she serves as principal investigator for the NSF’s Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub that drives efforts to use AI for social impact in the region. She previously served as the program director for the Information School’s master’s degree in information management and the campus-wide master’s in bioinformatics.
*Note: There will be no Carle Forum simulcast of this seminar.
