HLTCon: Saving Lives With Natural Language Processing at HLTCon

Detection and Prediction of Heart Attacks and Suicide From the Analysis of Unstructured Text

You’ve probably heard plenty about companies using text analytics to track of their brand on social media, or pull insights from product reviews, but the same software can predict far more serious occurrences than a dissatisfied customer. We’ve invited Karthik Dinakar, PhD candidate and Reid Hoffman Fellow at MIT, to speak at our Human Language Technology Conference (HLTCon) March 31st to discuss how text analytics can save lives.

Karthik will present his research that applies text understanding to five areas—online cyberbullying; online adolescent distress; crisis counseling on text hotlines; ways to model, predict and treat self-harm; and “cardiolinguistics” to model atypical angina in coronary heart disease.

For example, natural language processing technology can “read” texts written in social media or on chat helplines and find signals that alert doctors or counselors to a person who is threatened by cyberbullying or in imminent danger of directed self-harm. Similarly, heart attacks in women are often undiagnosed because their description of symptoms may not “present” as a heart attack. NLP models can detect these “hidden” incidents based on written doctor’s notes. Results of this research impacts critical issues in military, medicine, crisis counseling, and beyond.

Karthik is a computer scientist in the fields of machine learning, natural language processing and human-computer interaction to compute for empathy. A recipient of the 2015 Dewey Winburne Award, Karthik was twice invited by the White House to present his research on the computational detection of cyberbullying and on using probabilistic graphical models to scale crisis counseling in the United States.

Join us at HLTCon next week to hear a full day of talks about the real-world applications of human language technology from Karthik and speakers from the CIA, Luminoso, Prattle, Diffeo, MIT, Virginia Tech, SDL Government, Elastic, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Basis Technology.

This annual conference is sponsored by Basis Technology. It will be held at the Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner, Virginia on March 31, 2016. Registration is free to U.S. government employees with an active government ID. Register today to join us for this unique look into the HLT arena, and networking opportunities with its key leaders.

For more information, please visit www.hltcon.org, email conference@basistech.com, or call +1-617-386-2090.