Overview:I am a computer scientist working with both the Structural Informatics Group and the Biological Data Integration and Analysis Group (Bio-DIAG) at the Unversity of Washington. My education includes a master's degree in computer science, also from the UW. The Structural Informatics Group (SIG) (http://sig.biostr.washington.edu/), in the Department of Biological Structure, is a research group whose focus is on the development of computational methods for representing, managing, visualizing, and sharing information about the physical organization of the human body. The Biological Data Integration and Analysis Group (Bio-DIAG), in the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics of the Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, focuses on the integration and analysis of bio-medical data, across sources, in support of knowledge discovery. |
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Current Work:
My current work with SIG includes development/enhancement of the DXBrain project (http://sig.biostr.washington.edu/projects/dxbrain/). DXBrain, a distributed data integration system, supported by a grant from the Human Brain Project, facilitates the integration of multiple modalities of Brain data (i.e. fMRI, cortical stimulation mapping [CSM], EEG, etc.) across multiple heterogeneous data sources. My work with Bio-DIAG includes the implementation of enhancements to the existing distributed data integration system, BioMediator, to handle uncertainty about data and results at all levels of the integration process. This project is known as the Uncertain Information Integration Project (UII or U2 for short) (http://www.biomediator.org/uii/index.html).
Past Work:
For much of the past few years my work has focussed on software development for the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) (http://fma.biostr.washington.edu) project. The FMA is a detailed and highly organized symbolic representation of the structural components of the human body formulated in a manner processable by software applications. The FMA ontology empowers such application with expert knowledge of anatomy upon which further inference can be based. My work has primarily centered around designing and building software to support or augment the FMA. This includes application for browsing and querying the model as well as tools to assist in its development and maintenance.
Interests (possible future work):
I am interested in working on any of the following projects (all of which directly relate to the needs of SIG and/or Bio-DIAG):
- Developing methods for expressing and interacting with non-materialized ontology views
- Query composition - Especially as it relates to semantic web languages such as SparQL
- GUI interfaces for composing queries - XQuery or SparQL
- Methods for calculating query result uncertainty as well as ranking, sorting, visualizing according to such uncertainty measures
- Interfaces for Information Visualization - Novel ways of displaying semantic graphs
- Combining symbolic and geometric knowledge resources into a unified query system
