MIS Speaker's Series with Gondy Leroy

Date: Friday, May 11, 2012
Time: 3:00 - 4:00 pm
Location: McClelland 128
Cost: None
Event RSVP: None

SPEAKER: Dr. Gondy Leroy, Associate Professor, Claremont Graduate University

TITLE: Transdiciplinary solutions to communication problems in healthcare and biomedicine.

Abstract: Transdisciplinary approaches to problems in biomedicine and healthcare produce richer and more robust solutions than single-discipline methods. In this presentation, three projects are introduced that apply tools and techniques from information and computer science, (bio)medicine, and linguistics synergistically to yield a better outcome that emphasizes end user usefulness and satisfaction. For each project, teaming, approach, research results and future opportunities and challenges are presented.

The PixTalk project focuses on pictorial communication with children with severe autism. Communication software was developed for mobile devices and fused with a support environment for data tracking. The software was evaluated in different settings. Communication skill learning by children was demonstrated, as was the enormous data integration potential for therapists. The second project focuses on bringing improved health-related information to the patient and to the public. Automated and semi-automated visualization and simplification of text were tested for their potential to increase understanding and retention of information. The evidence sheds new light on some of the different techniques that can adjust the difficulty of text and increase understanding. However, caution is needed with the most vulnerable patient and consumer groups. The third project focuses on using visual search queries with biomedical text. A prototype search engine was developed that uses query diagrams and matches them to predicates extracted from biomedical text. The results show much better search behavior by users, yielding more precise and relevant results. There is potential for combining the information from the predicates with data from experiments, but also for finding complementary information and even contradictions, and for searching with variables, a capability not provided by any search engine today.

Bio: Gondy Leroy is associate professor in the School of Information Systems and Technology at Claremont Graduate University. She was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), where she earned a combined B.S. and M.S. in Experimental Psychology (1996). She received an Erasmus scholarship (European Union) to spend four months as research assistant at the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology (UK). She earned a M.S. and Ph.D. in Management Information Systems (2003) from the University of Arizona’s M.I.S. department (USA). In 2003 and 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the National Library of Medicine (NLM/NIH). Her projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health, Microsoft Research, and several foundations. She has published her work in ACM Computing Surveys, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology (JASIST), International Journal of Medical Informatics, and IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine (IEEE-TITB) among others. She authored the book “Designing User Studies in Informatics” published by Springer as part of the Health Informatics series and conducts tutorials on the topic. As part of her outreach activities, she is a team leader at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and active in organizing workshops and doctoral consortia to encourage women to enter and remain in the field of computing. She is an IEEE Senior Member, serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Database Management, International Journal of Social and Organizational Dynamics in IT, Health Systems and several conference program committees. She is fluent in English and Dutch and has basic conversation skills in French, Spanish and German. http://web.cgu.edu/faculty/leroy/ .

For more information contact:

Mingfeng Lin, PhD.
Assistant Professor, MIS Department
Phone: 520-621-2684
mingfeng@email.arizona.edu

Have an MIS event you would like to share? Please contact us.