Media plays a big role in how citizens evaluate public health emergencies. This project seeks to understand how public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis are reported. In order to assess the polarization and politicization of U.S. news coverage, we are comparing news by political leaning (left, center, right) as segmented by AllSides media bias ratings. We…

Breast cancer (BC) is a chronic illness. BC survivors often deal with the lifelong needs of self-management, such as controlling the symptoms, taking diet or nutrition plans, or adopting a physical activity program across their cancer survivorship continuum. Our team is eager to develop a novel technique to predict the intentions of lifestyle behavior by tracking ones' information behavior and…

This project aims improve upon a tool clinicians, researchers, and systematic reviewers use to retrieve biomedical articles from bibliographic databases. Associate Professors Halil Kilicoglu and Jodi Schneider will work with Affiliate Professor Neil Smalheiser, professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois Chicago, on the project, which has received funding from the National Institutes…

Individuals with multiple sclerosis are likely to be hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine due to their compromised health condition. This project aims to develop an accessible, generalizable and efficient digital health solution for promoting COVID-19 vaccination among vulnerable populations, such as people with disabilities.

Nearly one million adults live with multiple sclerosis (MS) in the U.S. Given that there is no cure for MS, self-management of health is essential for people with MS (PwMS). The project aims at bridging theories in social and behavioral sciences (such as health literacy, Health Action Process Approach) to build lifelong-learning user models, elibrary system, and new algorithms for providing…

Policy in areas such as conservation, energy, healthcare, and sustainable development is informed by a variety of factors, including the best available science. Determining the best available science requires synthesizing multiple scientific results to gauge both the level of scientific consensus and the reliability of the research. However, on some policy-relevant topics, syntheses continue…

The scientific challenge for this project is to accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. In particular, many parts used in synthetic biology come from or are initially tested in a simple bacteria, E. coli, but many potential applications in energy, agriculture, materials, and health require either different bacteria or higher level organisms (yeast for…

COMBINI (connecting Complementary Medicine and Biological kNowledge to support Integrative Health) is a collaboration between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Mayo Clinic in Florida. Illinois serves as the primary site.

The goal of the project is to develop informatics resources and scientific…

Randomized clinical trials are valuable in determining the effectiveness of health treatments. But problems with design, execution or reporting of the trial process can lead to unreliable findings, excessive costs, and, potentially, harm for patients. Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu is leading a  team of computer/information scientists and clinical research methodologists in…

There are 2.5 million people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) worldwide. Since there is no cure for multiple sclerosis, PwMS needs to practice self-management activities, such as physical activities, diets, emotion regulation, on a daily basis. Self-efficacy, the belief about ones’ capabilities to implement behavior needed to reach a goal, is the longitudinal determinant of health and well-…

This project works with the Illinois Department of Public Health to develop an information system that will enable local health departments and other stakeholders in Illinois to use and analyze data currently being disseminated by IDPH. This data will be used to develop health indicators, such as maternal and infant health, non-communicable diseases, drug overdoses, healthcare access, and…

There are approximately 600,000 individuals in the U.S. with kidney failure undergoing maintenance hemodialysis (HD) therapy. HD patients have several co-morbidities, including muscle wasting, cardiovascular disease, and bone disorders, with very high medical costs, averaging ~ $93,000/patient/year. Lifestyle interventions such as exercise and nutritional modification are often prescribed to…

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., with over 34,000 new HPV-related cancers diagnosed annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An HPV vaccine, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006, is recommended as part of routine vaccinations for school-aged children. However, the vaccine's…

Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. The need for a bias detection tool is evident from previous studies on citation bias, but existing work lacks crucial elements needed to scale the underlying approaches. This project will test the…

It is difficult to understand the effectiveness of various treatment options when a huge number of external factors such as lifestyle, diet, and environment affect the burden of a disease. A major barrier to understanding is the challenge of scale—sampling enough patients to separate the major, minor, and negligible factors. With access to a database of more than one trillion public social…

This project is a collaboration with University of North Carolina (main site) and University of Colorado. Halil Kilicoglu serves as a co-PI and the lead at the University of Illinois. 

Systematic reviews are used to develop clinical guidelines, to set research priorities, and to help patients and clinicians make healthcare decisions. Systematic reviews of drugs should identify harms…

INDICATOR is a novel information system for collecting, integrating, and analyzing data from multiple sources to provide public health decision makers real-time data on the health of their community. Data comes from sources as varied as emergency department visits, school attendance, veterinary clinics, and social media postings and together have been used to change public policy in outbreak…

This project will assist researchers and journals in evaluating citation behavior in biomedical publications. While citations play a fundamental role in the diffusion of scientific knowledge and assessment of research on a topic, they are often inaccurate (e.g., citation of nonexistent findings, inappropriate interpretation). This inaccuracy undermines the integrity of scientific literature…

This project will develop a mobile sensor technology for performing detection and identification of viral and bacterial pathogens. By means of a smartphone-based detection instrument, the results are shared with a cloud-based data management service that will enable physicians to rapidly visualize the geographical and temporal spread of infectious disease. When deployed by a community of…

Taxonomists are scientists who describe the world’s biodiversity. These descriptions of millions of species allow scientists to do many different kinds of research, including basic biology, environmental science, climate research, agriculture, and medicine. The problem is that describing any one species is not easy. The language used by taxonomists to describe their data is complex, and…

This project will focus on real-world problems where underrepresented, rare (abnormal) examples play critical roles, such as defective silicon wafers resulting from a new semiconductor manufacturing process and rare but severe complications (e.g., kidney failure) among diabetes patients.

"This problem of explainable rare category analysis was motivated by my collaboration with IBM…

When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. Schneider's project will bring together a variety of stakeholders, including funders, editors, peer reviewers, authors, and publishers for interviews and a workshop. In addition to investigating the…

Scientific and technical information is often translated for the public, by knowledge brokers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists, and public librarians. This project will research how knowledge brokers assess the quality of scientific and technical information and the implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science. The project will use case…