Integrated methodologies (machine learning, data analysis, natural language) and their use in health/language applications and assistive technologies for people with disabilities

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Two broad areas of investigation encompass my primary research interests: (1) machine learning and associated technologies for health and language applications; and (2) assistive technologies for people with disabilities. A judicious mixture of theory and practice has produced theoretical and methodological progress resulting in advanced prototype software implementations. Examples of this theory/practice admixture include finding best evidence for evidence-based medicine, verification of independently accumulated evidence using multiply sectioned Bayesian networks, and hybrid systems design using machine learning tasks such as classification and prediction. Another example uses head driven phase structured grammar approaches for speech prosody, language translation, text mining and n-gram analysis to generalize language research to a wider class of problems, e.g., author attribution, classifying dementia levels in patients with mild cognitive impairment from patient-caregiver transcripts, detecting malicious code in email, and designing software to assist students with disabilities. Machine learning and associated technologies for health & language applications: Our research effectively exploits solutions to a major problem for Canadian health organizations: finding best evidence for evidence based best practice recommendations. A long-term goal is to develop a decision support system for evidence based management and best practice recommendations by: (1) building prototypes for adaptive information extraction, text & data mining from documents on which to base best practices; & (2) employing multiply sectioned Bayesian networks to infer a probabilistic interpretation to validate evidence for recommendations. HYRIS generalizes our rough set-based hybrid intelligent system for survival analysis. Assistive technologies for people with disabilities help them accomplish tasks that they cannot accomplish otherwise or could not do easily. Our research specializes on technology for persons with vision impairment, with hearing impairment and with learning disabilities and mild cognitive impairment.