Title: Medical Digital Library to Support Scenario Specific Information Retrieval

Date: Tuesday, 17 April 2001

Time: 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue: Room 2406, HKUST

Abstract
Current large-scale information sources are designed to support general queries and lack the ability to support scenario-specific information navigation, gathering, and presentation. As a result, users are often unable to obtain desired specific information within a well-defined subject area. Today's information systems do not provide efficient content navigation, incremental approximate matching, or content correlation. We are developing the following innovative technologies to remedy these problems: 1) scenario- based proxies, enabling the gathering and filtering of information customized for users within a pre-defined domain; 2) context-sensitive navigation and matching, providing approximate matching and similarity links when an exact match to a user's request is unavailable; 3) content correlation of documents, creating semantic links between documents and information sources; 4) user models for customizing retrieved information and result presentation; and 5) Phrase indexing for document retrieval and summarization. A digital medical library is currently being constructed using these technologies to provide customized information for the user. The technologies are general in nature and can provide custom and scenario-specific information in many other domains (e.g., crisis management).

Biography
Dr. Wesley W. Chu is a professor of Computer Science and was the past chairman (1988- 1991) of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.S.E. (EE) and M.S.E. (EE) from the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. (EE) from Stanford University.

From 1964 to 1966, he worked on the design of large-scale computers at IBM, Menlo Park and San Jose, California. From 1966 to 1969, he researched computer communications and distributed databases at Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey. He joined the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969. He directs a research group at UCLA in the areas of distributed processing, knowledge-based multimedia medical information systems, and intelligent information systems.

He was the conference chair of the 16th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER'97). He is also currently a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal on Very Large Databases and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Data and Knowledge Engineering. Dr. Chu is a Fellow of IEEE.