DMIN'11 Invited Lecture: Prof. Nitesh V. Chawla

Proactive personalized medicine is expected to bring fundamental changes, offering recommendations of lifestyle adjustments and treatments to avoid diseases a patient has high risk for developing in the future. Due to common genetic, molecular, environmental, and lifestyle-based individual risk factors, most diseases do not occur in isolation. No matter how unique our medical experiences, chances are that other patients among millions have experienced genetic and environmental risk factors that closely mirror ours. In this talk, I will present our work that builds a comprehensive recommendation system, called CARE (Collaborative Assessment and Recommendation Engine), by pulling in experience of millions of patients to answer the question. I will also present our work on multi-relational representation of disease networks using both genetic knowledge, based on previously discovered gene-disease associations and phenotypic data from real patient histories.

Nitesh Chawla is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He directs the Data Inference Analysis and Learning Lab (DIAL) and co-directs the Interdisciplinary Center of the Network Science and Applications (iCenSA) at Notre Dame. His research is primarily focused on machine learning, data mining, and social and dynamic networks. His work has led to applications in various domains including biology, medicine, finance, security, social science, fraud detection, intrusion detection, and text categorization. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part B. He has received various awards and acknowledgements. He received the NAE FIE New Faculty Fellowship in 2005. His current research is supported form NSF, DOD, NWICG, NIJ, and industry sponsors.