Dissertation Proposal Defense - Jason Portenoy
You are cordially invited to join us for the Proposal Defense of Jason Portenoy, to be held on Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2020, via Zoom from 2-4 p.m. PST.
Title: Harnessing Scholarly Literature as Data to Curate, Explore and Evaluate Scientific Research
Abstract:
There currently exist hundreds of millions of scientific publications, with more being created at an ever-increasing rate. This is leading to information overload: the scale and complexity of this body of knowledge is increasing well beyond the capacity of any individual to make sense of it all, overwhelming traditional, manual methods of curation and synthesis. At the same time, the availability of this literature and surrounding metadata in structured, digital form, along with the proliferation of computing power and techniques to take advantage of large-scale and complex data, represents an opportunity to develop new tools and techniques to help people make connections, synthesize, and initiate new questions. My proposed work consists of several contributions of data, methods, and tools aimed at addressing information overload in science. My central contribution to this space is Autoreview, a framework for building and evaluating systems to automatically select relevant publications for literature reviews, starting from small sets of seed papers. These automated methods have the potential to help researchers save time and effort when keeping up with relevant literature, as well as surfacing papers that more manual methods may miss. My additional contributions include work curating, linking, and processing a variety of large scholarly data sets to be used for many different applications, research and otherwise; and the design and development of interactive, exploratory visualizations to assist in navigating and making discoveries in the scientific literature.
Supervisory Committee:
- Jevin D West, Chair
- Benjamin C. Hill, GSR
- William Gregory Howe, Member
- Emma Stuart Spiro, Member