Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider will present her medical informatics research at the 3rd European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2019), which will take place on June 24-27 in Groningen, the Netherlands. The biennial conference attracts scholars on argumentation worldwide from various disciplines. The theme of ECA 2019 is "Reason to Dissent."
Schneider will give the talk, "Beyond Randomized Clinical Trials: Emerging Innovations in Reasoning about Health," with Sally A. Jackson, professor of communications at Illinois. According to the researchers, Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT) is widely regarded as the gold standard for making inferences about causal relationships between medical treatments and patient outcomes.
"In our paper, we examine several speculative movements within health science (notably 'pragmatic trials' and 'N-of-1 trials') that seek to go beyond the RCT as a basis for generating knowledge about medical treatments," Schneider said. "We explore the arguments that have helped to re-open debate over Randomized Clinical Trial, exploring the tensions that arise from the competing perspectives of scientists, clinicians, and patients."
Schneider studies the science of science through the lens of arguments, evidence, and persuasion. She is developing linked data (ontologies, metadata, Semantic Web) approaches to manage scientific evidence. She holds a PhD in informatics from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Prior to joining the iSchool in 2016, Schneider served as a postdoctoral scholar at the National Library of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, and INRIA, the national French Computer Science Research Institute.