PhD student Willis receives NIH funding for expansion models research

Craig Willis
Craig Willis, Teaching Assistant Professor

Doctoral student Craig Willis has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to work with the biomedical and healthCAre Data Discovery Index Ecosystem (bioCADDIE)/DataMED team on a pilot project this summer. The award is based on his participation in the 2016 bioCADDIE Dataset Retrieval Challenge, which had the objective of creating innovative ways for biomedical researchers to search and discover biomedical research data.

"bioCADDIE is an NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) project to develop the DataMed [2] system, sometimes described as the 'PubMed of data,'" said Willis. "At the end of the challenge, they awarded two subcontracts. The goal of my project is to prototype and evaluate expansion models for integration into the DataMed system."

According to Willis, searching for biomedical information often requires the use of specialized language or vocabularies that may not always be reflected in users' queries. Feedback-based query expansion models alleviate this problem and improve search engine performance by automatically expanding the user's query to include additional terms related to their information need. His project will demonstrate how expanding the query based on information from external collections such as PubMed can improve overall retrieval effectiveness.

Willis is working with Associate Professor Miles Efron in the area of information retrieval and with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as a research programmer on the National Data Service project. Doctoral student Garrick Sherman, MS student Thuong Phan, and NCSA Research Programmer Mike Lambert are working with Willis on his project, "Expansion Models for Biomedical Data Search." The project's funding is a subaward from the University of California San Diego that will cover $50,000 in direct costs.   

Research Areas:
Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Das receives student membership award from ASIS&T

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.

Puranjani Das

Kim defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Jenna Kim headshot

Desai defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

Smit Desai

Student says ‘thank you’ with a helicopter ride

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.

Michael Wonderlich and Michael Ferrer hold a U of I flag in front of a military helicopter

Shang defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Lanyu Shang successfully defended her dissertation, "A Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence Approach Towards Equality, Well-Being, and Responsibility in Sustainable Communities," on June 19.

Lanyu Shang