On December 20, 2018, CCADD had a day-long workshop at the Yeongeon Campus. The workshop was attended not only by the existing CCADD members, but also by a new CCADD intern and a graduate student in the Interdisciplinary Program of Clinical Pharmacology at Seoul National University. The workshop included 12 presentations, the theme of which covered the history and milestones of CCADD, educational and research activities, talent acquiring strategy, homepage management, student internship experiences, communication, and teambuilding exercise. Furthermore, Professor Kyung-Sang Yu from the SNU College of Medicine and SNU Hospital (Department of Clinical Pharmacology) was invited to a special lecture session. Prof. Yu talked about the importance of e-mail as a means of business communication. He also stressed the appropriate e-mail manners in various business communication contexts.

After the workshop, CCADD members and their family members or invited friends went on a year-end dinner party, which was extended to a sleepover program. All brought a so-called 'useless' gift to the party, which as real fun. The winner of the most useless gift was Tae Chung, who received a used book named 'Sleep 2', written by Bernard Werber, but without having its first book, i.e., 'Sleep1'.

Okay, let's now look at the pictures below and you will easily notice how crazy the party was!

Prof. Howard Lee and Yoomin Jeon attended the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2018) held at the Square Meeting Center in Brussels from October 31^st through November 4^th, 2018. EMNLP is one of the top-tier conferences in the area of natural language processing organized by SIGDAT, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) special interest group on linguistic data and corpus-based approaches to NLP. With the current artificial intelligence and machine learning boom from a variety of disciplines, this year's conference had a record-breaking number of submissions (2,231) and 2,500+ attendees, a 48% increase compared with EMNLP 2017. Of all the long and short papers submitted, only 549 papers were accepted, which can be found in the EMNLP proceedings. The conference included two days of workshops, followed by three days of main conference sessions including long and short presentations, tutorials, and demos. Researchers and practitioners from around the world gathered to share their latest research findings and emerging trends in machine learning for NLP, machine translation, language models, text mining, information extraction, and many more. 

In the 'Writing Code for NLP Research' tutorial, researchers from Allen AI Institute shared their best practices learned from designing the development of the Allen NLP toolkit, a PyTorch-based open-source library for deep learning NLP research. It was an excellent tutorial to learn practical advice on writing research code and to recognize the importance of having good quality codes. In the 'Deep Latent Variable Models of Natural Language' tutorial, deep latent variable models were covered, which are emerging as a useful tool in NLP applications. Mainly, three types of latent variable models (discrete, continuous, and structured) and inference strategies (exact gradient, sampling, and conjugacy) over the latent variables were examined. 

There were a number of presentations/papers in the clinical domain. One of the interesting papers, titled 'emrQA: A Large Corpus for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Records', proposed a novel semi-automated framework to generate domain-specific large-scale question answering (QA) corpus by leveraging expert annotations on clinical notes for various NLP tasks from the i2b2 challenge datasets. For medical QA on EMR, they released 400K+ question-answer evidence pairs and 1M question-logical forms, a representation useful for generating corpus. Generating patient-specific QA from an EMR is an important NLP task to process a natural language question and provide a human level accuracy answer. Among many datasets that were presented at the conference, a clinical domain dataset MedNLI was included. MedNLI is a Natural Language Inference (NLI) dataset on the medical history of patients annotated by physicians, which we can later refer in our research.   

Five CCADD members (Prof. Howard Lee, Dr. Soohyun Kim, Yoomin Jeon, Tae Chung, Serin Lee) have attended the Fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI) held at Chonbuk National University on November 22-23, 2018. The theme of the conference was 'Real World Data to optimize clinical trials', which reflects a growing role and value of big data and artificial intelligence for clinical trials. Over 700 people from academia, public institutions, and the pharmaceutical industry gathered to share their experiences, practices, insights, and perspectives on the more active use of data and information sciences in clinical trials.

Prof. Howard Lee spoke about AI-based patient recruitment in clinical trial in an invited session, entitled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment using Electronic Medical Records(EMR)'. Prof. Lee emphasized the application of AI technology to clinical trial feasibility such as feature selection algorithms in machine learning to identify common sensitive eligibility features (cSEFs). 

Yoomin Jeon and Tae Chung presented a poster at the conference too. Yoomin's poster was about the actual application of what Prof. Lee introduced in his talk. Tae examined the extent of mapping of ICD-10 to MeSH to crosswalk and synchronize different terms collected from different data sources. (Analysis of agreement status between the diagnostic code of MeSH and ICD-10).

Meanwhile, Dr. Soohyun Kim led a tutorial session, where she taught several essential statistical methods for biomedical informatics research using R. 

For more details, you may want to contact Yoomin Jeon or Tae Chung.

Prof. Howard Lee has been recently awarded a government grant from the Small Grant Exploratory Research (SGER) Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea or NRF to develop a model for assessing clinical trials feasibility. The total research funding was $223,000 over a 3 year period (11/01/18 to 10/31/21), which is equivalent to 250 million Korean Won. After a year of an initial stage of research, funding may be continued for additional two more years based on satisfactory progress. The title of Prof. Lee's proposed research plan was "A Dimensionality Reduction Model to increase the efficiency and accuracy of clinical trial feasibility assessment using electronic medical records". This research aimed to develop a machine learning-based dimensionality reduction model to identify the common sensitive eligibility features (cSEFs) that could increase the efficiency of clinical trials feasibility in the presence of intended patient population characteristics. Feature Selection algorithms will be used to enhance the performance of this machine learning model. 

Prof. Howard Lee emphasized the importance of the holistic approach to ensure the safe use of biological agents, particularly in the field of rheumatology, at a policy forum sponsored by the Korean College of Rheumatology, held at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club, Press Center, on November 14, 2018. Biological agents, since first introduced in the late 1990s, have changed the way that physicians managed patients with various connective tissue diseases, of which rheumatoid arthritis is a typical example. "Because biological agents are way different from small-molecule drugs in terms of their safety profiles, which most physicians are not familiar with", Prof. Lee said, "they have to be used carefully, preferably only by those who were trained how to correctly prescribe them and those who are experienced in detecting the adverse reactions, which often clinically manifested in atypical forms." "Reactivation of latent tuberculosis and increased occurrence of opportunistic infections are some examples", Prof. Lee added. Registries of patients using biological agents can be a useful tool to track down and detect adverse effects of biological agents, which are not easy to be screened out in clinical trials before marketing approval. In that sense, Prof. Lee requested the rheumatology society to be more proactive by initiating and maintaining a series of safety measures, hopefully under a full collaboration with and support by the regulatory agency. Most of the panelists at the forum agreed with Prof. Lee. 

Two CCADD members, Dr. Soohyun Kim (PhD in statistics) and Siun Kim (BS in biology) gave presentations at the 2018 Korean Statistical Society Fall Conference , held on November 2-3 at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Kim gave an oral presentation of an update of her research on optimal experimental design. Additionally, Siun presented a poster discussing the appropriateness of an equivalence margin used in a clinical trial with CT-P13, an infliximab biosimilar, developed by Celltrion. Dr. Kim’s presentation was well received from her peer statisticians, who have been actively working in the field of experimental statistics in Korea. Interestingly, statisticians at Celltrion dropped by Siun’s poster and asked several questions. On the first day of the conference, Dr. Kim joined a tutorial session on deep learning from a statistician’s point of view.

ACTRiS and P-MATCH are the acronym of the two research projects CCADD has been undertaking, each representing the AI-based Clinical Trial Resource Information System and the the Precision Machine Learning AssisTed Clinical Trial Eligibility Assessment using Hospital Records, respectively. From the very moment of its establishment, CCADD has been quite keen on branding a new concept that it produced by using a professionally-designed and aesthetically-executed logo.

The ACTRiS and P-MATCH logos are easily recognizable through the use of a bold and capitalized sans-serif typeface except for a small 'i' in ACTRiS. The iconic figure left to the text in the logos symbolizes a pill or capsule cut in half. The figure is also cut in two, a triangle (left) and the remaining dome-shape (right), each denoting A and P, which are starting letters in ACTRiS and P-MATCH, respectively. Furthermore, a square dot after PMATCH makes the two logos attain some level of consistency between them. There are three variations in color: green, dark gray and white on black.

Chloe Minkyeong Lee of StudioPEEK created the logos, who also designed the logo of CCADD. The ACTRiS logo will feature at the web-based clinical trial information system CCADD is currently working on.

Prof. Howard Lee and Hyun A Lee attended the 9^th American Conference on Pharmacometrics (ACoP9), held October 7^th to 10^th, 2018, at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort near San Diego, CA, USA. ACoP is the annual scientific meeting of the International Society of Pharmacometrics (ISoP), an organization comprised individuals from around the globe from various backgrounds in pharmaceutics, engineering, statistics, and mathematics, who are passionate about advancing and promoting the field of pharmacometrics. The theme of ACoP9, "Modeling without Bounds",  means "internationalization/collaboration" and "fusion/integration" of pharmacometrics groups, methods, and tools among the fields of pharmacometrics and systems pharmacology, with more than 1,000 members from over 30 countries. Consistent with this theme, inspiring and innovative talks by the Keynote (Mr. Walter Woltosz, Simulations Plus) and the State of Art ( Prof. Andrew Lo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) speakers were presented. The titles of their speeches were "Rocket motors, Stephen Hawking, and drug development" and "p-Values vs. Patient values: An Analytic Perspective", respectively. In addition, the pre-conference program on "Digital Health Technology, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Clinical Trials and Informative Therapeutic Decisions?" highlighted the latest innovations and clinical applications of digital health technologies. The conference program included >100 invited lectures/presentations and over 300 posters, tutorials, pre- and post-meeting workshops, and abundant networking opportunities with attendees from around the world. 

Hyun A Lee presented a poster at the meeting that detailed the development of a physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model of YH4808, a novel potassium-competitive acid blocker to treat gastric acid related disease. In this study, the mechanistic cause of the decreased exposure YH4808 after multiple oral administration particularly at higher doses could be identified using the PBPK model.

In addition, you may want to contact Hyun A for her poster. 

A photo shoot for the 2019 calendar was real fun. CCADD members gathered at Mr.Photo studio in Daehangno, October 1, where many props including wigs, hair bands, and hats were available. All tried first different outfits and selected themes such that the lab portraits stood out. Finally, five best photos were chosen for edit and retouch as seen in this page. One of them will feature in the next year calendar for the graduate school.

It was a new experience to many of CCADD members. However, everyone enjoyed shooting thanks to the photographer, who skillfully took the very best moment in a joyful and encouraging atmosphere. This hour-long photo shooting was not only fun, but also helped CCADD build closeness and solidarity.