My name is Byron Wallace.
I'm an assistant professor at Northeastern University in the College of Computer and Information Science. 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 923 177 Huntington.
My research is in machine learning/data mining and natural language processing, 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.
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.
KD Onal, Y Zhang, IS Altingovde, M Rahman, P Karagoz, A Braylan, B Dang, HL Chang, H Kim, Q McNamara, A Angert, E Banner, V Khetan, T McDonnell, AT Nguyen, D Xu, BC Wallace, M Rijke, and M Lease. Neural Information Retrieval: At the End of the Early Years Information Retrieval; 2018.
An T. Nguyen, Aditya Kharosekar, Saumyaa Krishnan, Siddhesh Krishnan, Elizabeth Tate, Byron C. Wallace and Matthew Lease. Believe it or not: Designing a Human-AI Partnership for Mixed-Initiative Fact-Checking ACM UIST; 2018.
Sarthak Jain and Byron C. Wallace. An Analysis of Attention over Clinical Notes for Predictive Tasks The 2nd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop (co-located with NAACL); 2019.
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.
07/02/2018 "Top Reviewer" @ ACL '18
I was recognized as a top reviewer for ACL 2018.
06/08/2018 SRSM Early Career Award
I have been selected as the recipient of the 2018 Early Career Award, from the Society for Research Synthesis Methods.
04/09/2018 Talks at upcoming local events: NEML, ODSC & NECHS
I'm excited to be giving invited talks at the New England Machine Learning day and Data Science Conference & Expo (ODSC East). I'll also be speaking on a panel at NorthEast Computational Health Summit (NECHS)
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.
