Events Calendar

Professor Padmini Srinivasan of the University of Iowa Department of Computer Sciences will present on "Text Mining: A Field of Opportunities and Challenges."

We live in exciting times with a variety of options for staying connected with each other, for expressing our thoughts and creativity, for recording observations about ourselves and about others and for documenting our advances.  As a consequence, there is an abundance of texts of different types from social media posts, technical writings, captions on graphics, emails, notes written by health care providers etc.  When collected, these large and varied text ‘collections’ form rich repositories of human expression that can be processed using automated ‘text mining’ algorithms for either exploratory analysis or for hypothesis driven study.  For example, one might analyze text messages between individuals to explore sender - recipient power balance.  One might analyze technical writing or poetry from different eras to see if distinct time periods have distinct stylistic signatures.  Or one might mine medical records to predict diagnosis. This talk will illustrate these opportunities with projects that we have worked on in recent years.  The aim is to convey the excitement and challenges in the field of text mining and its broad applicability to different domains.

Lunch will be available.