Dari AlHuwail and Dr. Gunes Koru presented a poster and delivered an interactive presentation on findings from a recent qualitative research study on the Quality of Care in Home Health context.

Jennifer Sleeman and Tim Finin, Taming Wild Big Data, AAAI Fall Symposium on Natural Language Access to Big Data, Nov. 2014.

Wild Big Data is data that is hard to extract, understand, and use due to its heterogeneous nature and volume. It typically comes without a schema, is obtained from multiple sources and provides a challenge for information extraction and integration. We describe a way to subduing Wild Big Data that uses techniques and resources that are popular for processing natural language text. The approach is applicable to data that is presented as a graph of objects and relations between them and to tabular data that can be transformed into such a graph. We start by applying topic models to contextualize the data and then use the results to identify the potential types of the graph’s nodes by mapping them to known types found in large open ontologies such as Freebase, and DBpedia. The results allow us to assemble coarse clusters of objects that can then be used to interpret the link and perform entity disambiguation and record linking.

As guest editor of the spring 2014 issue of Peer Review, Patrice McDermott, vice provost for faculty affairs, coauthored an introductory essay that calls for greater inclusivity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

While the United States seeks to increase the number of STEM workers, the number of women STEM graduates decreased by 39% from 2001 to 2010. In order to reverse this trend, McDermott and co-author Kelly Mack advocate for growing the number of female faculty members, which has been shown to have positive effects on retaining female students. The article states, “We need a fundamental reconsideration of women faculty as a powerful and untapped resource for meeting our goal of achieving a well-prepared and highly diversified STEM workforce, now and in the future.”

Click here to read “The Twenty-First-Century Case for Inclusive Excellence in STEM.” Renetta Tull, associate vice provost for graduate student development and postdoctoral affairs, also contributed to this issue of Peer Review. Click here to learn more.

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