NIH R01 Grant Awarded to SMASH Team Led by Professor Dejing Dou
Professor Dejing Dou is the leader of a multi-discipliny team that was recently awarded a 3-year $1.5M R01 grant from the NIH/NIGMS, entitled "Understanding the Mechanism of Social Network Influence in Health Outcomes through Multidimensional and Semantic Data Mining Approaches."
Research in the design and implementation of the SMASH (Semantic Mining of Activity, Social, and Health data) system will address a critical need for formal ontologies, data mining, graph mining, and privacy preserving tools to help understand the influence of healthcare social networks on sustained weight loss, where the data are multi-dimensional, temporal, semantically heterogeneous, and very sensitive. The SMASH project began in 2010 as a collaboration with PeaceHealth’s YesiWell project, and expanded the following year to research groups from Kent State University and UNC Charlotte.
The SMASH research team includes the PI Dejing Dou, an expert in ontologies, semantic data mining, and data integration, at the University of Oregon; Co-I Brigitte Piniewski MD, the chief medical officer at PeaceHealth Laboratories and the lead of YesiWell; Co-I Ruoming Jin, an expert in graph mining, social network and big data analysis, at Kent State University; Co-I Xintao Wu, an expert in privacy preserving mining, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Co-I Jessica Greene, an expert in health policy and online intervention, at the University of Oregon and George Washington University; Co-I Daniel Lowd, expert in statistical machine learning, at the University of Oregon; Consultant David Kil, the previous Chief Scientist at SKT Americas and program manager of YesiWell, and the founder of HealthMantic; and Co-I Junfeng Sun, a mathematical statistician at the NIH and an expert in the design of clinical trials.
For more information about the SMASH project. Please visit the project website at http://aimlab.cs.uoregon.edu/SMASH/.