Mar 31
CS Tea: Denis Newman-Griffis '12
Making data science work in the real world: decision-making and disability
Dr. Denis Newman-Griffis investigates ways of building computational tools to help people ask real-world questions about the information they work with. His research focuses on natural language processing (NLP) systems and methodologies for analyzing information about health and function, and on ethical design processes in medical artificial intelligence. In this talk, Dr. Newman-Griffis will give an overview of his line of research with the National Institutes of Health and US Social Security Administration in developing NLP systems to support the process of federal disability benefits determination, and describe emerging directions in the process of designing and evaluating NLP systems focused on disability. He will also discuss some of the twists and turns of his career path since Carleton, and share his thoughts on the wider world of computer and information sciences. This will be an interactive talk, and he looks forward to discussing your questions.
Biography: Denis Newman-Griffis (he/they) received his BA in Computer Science and Russian from Carleton College in 2012, and his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2020. He is currently a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh, and will be taking up a post as Lecturer (=Assistant Professor) in the Information School of the University of Sheffield, UK in Summer 2022. His research on natural language processing and translational data science has been published in competitive venues in language technologies and medical informatics, and he has worked in software development, academic settings, and government research. He is the recipient of the American Medical Informatics Association's 2021 Doctoral Dissertation Award. He is a proud non-binary and bisexual scientist and an organizer with Queer in AI, and spends as many weekends as possible out hiking.
We will gather in Olin 310 for the talk, which will be presented remotely.
Here is a Zoom link for those in isolation.
from Computer Science