My name is Byron Wallace.
I'm an assistant professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. I am the Director of the BS in Data Science program. I also hold an adjunct appointment at Brown University, where I am affiliated with the Center for Evidence Synthesis in Health.
My office is 2208 177 Huntington.
My research is in natural language processing and machine learning, with an emphasis on applications in health informatics.
For example, one of my major ongoing research aims concerns optimizing the processes of evidence-based medicine using novel natural language processing and machine learning methods. The aim is to reduce the (human) workload involved in conducting systematic reviews (i.e., making sense of the biomedical literature), so that we can realize the aim of evidence-based care in an era of information overload. An ongoing project in this direction is RobotReviewer. Here is an article written for a general audience about some of this work. I have also talked about this project at length on the NLP Highlights podcast, available here.
More broadly, I am interested in core machine learning and natural language processing issues: e.g., structured and unstructured classification techniques; neural models; semi-supervised learning methods; learning from imbalanced data; and learning from alternative forms of supervision. I tend to be most excited by interdisciplinary research that motivates technical questions by way of interesting applications.
Roma Patel, Yinfei Yang, Iain Marshall, Ani Nenkova, and Byron C. Wallace.. Syntactic Patterns Improve Information Extraction for Medical Search North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL); 2018.
Iain Marshall, Anna Noel Storr, Joël Kuiper, James Thomas and Byron C. Wallace. Machine Learning for Identifying Randomized Controlled Trials: an evaluation and practitioner’s guide Research Synthesis Methods; 2018.
Frank Soboczenski, Thomas A Trikalinos, Joël Kuiper, Randolph G Bias, Byron C Wallace and Iain J Marshall. Machine learning to help researchers evaluate biases in clinical trials: a prospective, randomized user study BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making; 2019.
08/15/2019 NIH/NLM R01 Renewed
The NIH has renewed the R01 grant that supports our work on RobotReviewer and related methods!
06/24/2019 NSF Grant
The NSF has awarded Jan-Willem van de Meent and I a grant to study disentangled representations for text!
05/20/2019 Early career spotlight @ IJCAI
I'll be giving an "early career spotlight" talk at IJCAI in August.
07/12/2018 ARO grant
The Army Research Office (ARO) has has selected my proposal, "Neural Models for Text: Improving Efficiency, Interpretability and Accuracy" for funding.
My work has been supported with grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation (including a CAREER grant), the Army Research Office, Seton hospital, Amazon and seed funds from Brown University.
