BI CHEN: October 2008 Archives
Here I would like to introduce some academic communities which are related to me at present or in the future.
The first communitiy I would like to introduce is AAAI. Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines [1]. The community of AAAI publishes books, proceedings, reports and grants.
The second community I may joint in in the future may be HCI community. Although my research is more close to technology, the current trend is combining technology and people. HCI as an interface between people and machine will achieve more and more attentions from technical persons. One community in HCI is CHI conference, which is the leading international forum for the exchange of ideas and information about human-computer interaction (HCI). [2]
The third community related to me is a community around NLP (natural language processing). Now more and more contents represented in an electronic form are availabe on the internet. Search engines provide us a convenient tool to find the webpages we want to read. However, in order to achieve better results, NLP should be used in order to understand the detailed information embeded in webpages. One community about NLP is conference, which covers a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling intelligent systems to interact with humans using natural language, and towards enhancing human-human communication through services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction.[3]
Reference:
[1] AAAI, http://www.aaai.org/home.html
[2] CHI, www.acm.org/pubs/contents/proceedings/series/chi/
[3] ACL, http://www.aclweb.org/
His research work focuses on medical informatics, which is a inter-disciplinary research area combing areas like computational, informational, cognitive, organizational, and other sciences. The main target of medical informatics is the acquisition, storage, and use of information in the health/biomedical domain. He has publish several good papers in some related conferences and journals.
There is a relationship between his research and mine. Because the research work in IST is inter-disciplinary in nature. It is hard for us to say their research work is different from one to another for any two students in IST. Inter-disciplinary is also advantages for the development of IST. His research needs to analysis electronic medical record in a free text form. Such analysis needs the technology of text mining, which is my research area.
In this article, I go on introduce my supervisor's research interest - information visualization. The great fun of information visualization is that it helps you to understand the information and find hidden information you do not realize before. What is new is that information visualization is becoming a mainstream tool. Just as we now expect everyone to be familiar with search engines, we will soon expect everyone to be familiar with information visualization tools. Maybe one important aspect of next-generation search engine is visualization. It will provides information visualization tools to help users filter and organize search process and results in a very efficient way. Another trend of information visualization is that intelligent technologies, like artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language process will be cooperated into information visualization system. In a conclusion, no matter how information visualization develops, one certain thing is that it will shape how we work and interact with the world over the next years and decades.
