CS&E Colloquium: Artificial Intelligence for Advancing Cancer, Nutrition and Aging Research

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Rui Zhang (University of Minnesota), will be giving a talk titled "Artificial Intelligence for Advancing Cancer, Nutrition and Aging Research."

Abstract

In this seminar, Dr. Zhang will provide an overview of his ongoing research projects aimed at advancing clinical research across various domains developing innovative artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Focusing on the cancer domain, Dr. Zhang will introduce cancer-domain language models developed to extract cancer phenotypes. This advancement holds significant implications for predicting cardiotoxicity related to cancer treatment. Shifting to the nutrition domain, the seminar will delve into Dr. Zhang's foundational work in establishing a knowledge base for dietary supplements.

Additionally, he will showcase AI methodologies employed to extract efficacy and safety information from diverse sources, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of dietary supplement safety. In the aging domain, Dr. Zhang will discuss the applications of AI to repurpose Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) approaches for Alzheimer's disease. The seminar will also highlight their recent work advancing large language models on multiple informatics tasks.

In addition, Dr. Zhang will briefly introduce the Division of Computational Health Sciences in the Medical School and discuss potential collaboration opportunities. 

Biography

Dr. Zhang is Professor and Founding Chief of Division of Computational Health Sciences in the Department of Surgery at the University of Minnesota. He is named as McKnight Presidential Fellow (a distinguished professorship) and currently the Director of Natural Language Processing/Information Extraction (NLP/IE) research program in the Institute for Health Informatics. Dr. Zhang is also Scientific co-Director of Innovative Methods & Data Science (IMDS) program at the Center for Learning Health System Sciences. Dr. Zhang’s research is at the forefront of integrating novel artificial intelligence (AI) with healthcare, focusing on analyze multi-modal biomedical big data, including electronic health records, biomedical literature, patient-generated data, and biomedical knowledge bases. His research has been fully supported by multiple National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants with a total cost over $20 million as a Principal Investigator, focusing on transformative AI projects such as mining safety use of dietary supplements (two NCCIH R01s), discovering drug repurposing of Alzheimer’s disease (NIA R01), predicting breast cancer treatment related cardiotoxicity (NCI R01), identifying medical language bias in kidney transplantation (NIDDK R01), minority-enriched risk predictive models on All of Us data (NIHMD R21). Dr. Zhang’s research has paved the way for groundbreaking advancement in personalized medicine in multiple clinical domains to better patient care. His work has been recognized on a national scale including Journal of Biomedical Informatics Editor’s Choice, nominated for Distinguished paper in American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium and Marco Ramoni Distinguished Paper Award for Translational Bioinformatics, reported by The Wall Street Journal, and interviewed by CBS News. Dr. Zhang is the Fellow of AMIA and the Chair-Elect of AMIA Natural Language Processing (NLP) Working Group. He has served as Vice Chair of AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium and editorial board for multiple journals such as JAMIA, JHIR, and BMC Medical Informatics.