WSDM 2017 Workshop on Mining Online Health Reports

Online health information is widely published by individuals in social media, chat rooms and discussion boards. At the same time search query logs and various forms of text messaging contain a vast amount of textual information that can be directly or indirectly linked to health conditions. This informal evidence about our individual health, attitudes and behaviours has the potential to be a valuable source for health applications ranging from real-time disease monitoring, to prioritising victim responses during disasters and detecting novel applications for drugs. Informal patient data on the Web is increasing, accessible, low cost, real-time and seems likely to cover a significant proportion of the population. Coupled with wearable body sensor data and the wealth of structured clinical data, it has the potential to offer insights leading to new lines of clinical investigation. However, in order to understand and integrate this data, researchers in academia and industry must grapple with theoretical, practical and ethical challenges that require immediate attention.

This workshop (co-located with the 10th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining) aims to bring together a cross-disciplinary audience of researchers from academia, industry and the health sector to share experience of techniques, resources and best practices, to exchange perspectives and prioritise future directions. We expect the workshop to develop a community of interested researchers, build future collaborations and develop understanding of best practice, e.g. with respect to ethical standards.

This workshop will be structured around four main research questions:

• How can current sources of online health reports be characterised and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
• How are online health reports being processed using NLP/IR/ML technologies and/or integrated into traditional forms of health data such as biomedical databases and patient records?
• How is online health data being used in real-world case studies and field evaluations?
• What are the ethical/legal issues surrounding the exploitation of personal health reports?

Organisers

- Nigel Collier (University of Cambridge)
- Nut Limsopatham (University of Cambridge)
- Ingemar J. Cox (University College London)
- Vasileios Lampos (University College London)
- Aron Culotta (Illinois Institute of Technology)
- Mike Conway (University of Utah)

Program Committee

- Eiji Aramaki (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)
- Matt-Mouley Bouamrane (University of Strathclyde)
- David Buckeridge (McGill University)
- Trevor Cohn (University of Melbourne)
- Glen Coppersmith (Johns Hopkins University and Qntfy)
- Courtney Corley (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
- Karen Fort (Paris-Sorbonne University)
- Gareth Jones (Dublin City University)
- Taha Kass-Hout (US Food and Drug Administration)
- Gregoire Lurton (University of Washington)
- Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)
- Michael J. Paul (University of Colorado, Boulder)
- Richard Pebody (Public Health England)
- Angus Roberts (University of Sheffield)
- Abeed Sarker (Arizona State University)
- Elad Yom-Tov (Microsoft Research)
(... more TBC)