U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series
Keynote Speaker - Dr. Louiqa Raschid
Explorations of a Data Scientist: From Finance to Therapeutics
Abstract
Financial Data: While there is a long tradition of data driven econometric and statistical research in finance, e.g., to predict stock prices, there is a compelling need today to analyze complex financial ecosystems and networks, e.g., the supply chain of real-estate securities based on subprime loans, or over the counter (OTC) markets, to monitor systemic risk. I will first discuss multiple activities that culminated in the NSF funded Business Open Knowledge Network (BOKN). I will also discuss how network and text analytics and a range of methods from clustering to probabilistic modeling can be usedto better understand complex financial eco-systems.
Therapeutic Drugs: There is excellent potential for breakthrough discoveries that exploit Linked Open Data and Big data in the biological and biomedical domains. Our goal is to exploit these rich human-curated graph datasets, in conjunction with the semantic knowledge captured in ontologies, to uncover novel and interesting patterns. Our approach to pattern discovery will build upon graph clustering and community detection algorithms within a data mining framework. To show the effectiveness of our methods, we will address multiple data mining challenges including interaction (link) prediction between drugs and gene targets and identifying communities of ontologically and functionally related drugs.
Biography - Dr. Louiqa Raschid
Professor, Smith School of Business and Computer Science, University of Maryland
Dr. Louiqa Raschid has made pioneering contributions towards meeting data integration and data management challenges in multiple non-traditional domains including the life sciences, health information systems, Web data delivery, humanitarian IT applications, social media monitoring, and the next generation of data science for finance research. Her multi-disciplinary research spans the fields of computer science, information systems and data science.
She is a professor at the University of Maryland where she holds appointments in the Institute of Advanced Computer Studies, the Smith School of Business and Computer Science. She received her primary and secondary education at Bishop’s College and St. Bridget’s Convent in Sri Lanka, and was ranked first in the 1973 island-wide General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (Year 10) examination. She received a Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1980, and an MS and Ph.D. degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1982 and 1987, respectively, in electrical engineering.
She was Editor in Chief of the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality and serves on the editorial board of ACM Computing Surveys. Her research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation and she is a Fellow of the ACM.