Yes, Boca Raton is in Florida, the average temperature of which in December is 24 degrees Celsius! Several CCADD members including Prof. Lee, Yoomin Jeon, Taekyu Chung, Siun Kim and Junsik Moon attended the Eighteenth International Conference on Machine Learning(ML) and Applications (ICMLA) held at Marriott Hotel, Boca Raton, Florida, USA on December 16-19, 2019. Like the subtropical climate of the city, the conference was also full of passionate researchers and practitioners presenting their latest achievements and innovations in the area of ML.

Started by three excellent keynote lectures, each day in the morning except for the first day, concerning the robustness/efficiency of data management, which was also aimed to attract researchers and application developers from a wide range of ML related areas, the conference covered not only an urgent need for machine learning to address new challenges from the recent emergence of Big Data processing but also theoretical research/application in ML.

Prof. Howard Lee and CCADD’s members were able to garner meaningful insight in each section describing machine learning techniques applied to real-world problems and interdisciplinary research involving machine learning in various fields such as medicine, biology, industry, security, and education. This gained insight was partly assisted by ‘Artificial Intelligence for New Drug Development and Clinical Application’, a course organized by Prof. Lee and taught by CCADD members last semester. Joining the conference, Prof. Lee seemed to be reinforced by the insight that could refine and strengthen the scope, direction, and emphasis of the research for CCADD.

After the conference, CCADD’s members visited Key West, the continental southernmost point, which is the starting point of U.S. Route 1, the longest north-south road in the United States. Not only enjoying classy seafood cuisine and stunning scenery while on road, but they had a chance to share interesting ideas as to the new research direction of CCADD.

The 2019 fall conference of The Korean Society of Medical Informatics (KOSMI), organized by Kyungpook National University Hospital (KNUH), was held November 8-9, 2019, at the Global Plaza, Kyunpook National University, Daegu. Prof. Howard Lee, Yoomin Jeon and Junsik Moon participated in the conference.

The conference presented 19 symposia, 6 oral presentation sessions of pre-selected paper submissions, and 3 tutorials in healthcare information, pharmaceutical and big data research which focused on analysis, application and standardization of data based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Sharing research ideas and analysis techniques, the attendees had an in-depth discussion on emerging issues and utilization in the fields of medical informatics.

On the second day, Prof. Lee chaired one of the oral presentation sessions entitled "New Drug and Pharmacovigilance", where he stressed full understanding of the research domain by communicating with experts in each research field. On the other hand, Yoomin presented two posters titled 'A Dimensionality Reduction Model to Increase the Efficiency and Accuracy of Clinical Trial Feasibility Assessment Using Electronic Medical Records' and 'A CDM-based Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy and Safety of SGLT2 Inhibitors as Add-on Treatment in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus on Metformin, Sulfonylurea and/or DPP-4 Inhibitors'. Yoomin's poster presentations were well received.

Through the conference, the three members of CCADD were delighted to get introduced to the leading academicians and industry experts in the field of medical informatics. Furthermore, Prof. Lee and two CCADD members had a fun discussion that helped them look deeply into their current activities and direction of future research. Their collected insights out of the conference will be further discussed at the upcoming year-end workshop in early December.

Join us in congratulating Hyun A Lee for her successful graduation with a PhD degree in medical science in August 2019! Dr. Hyun A Lee came to CCADD in 2017, 2 years after she started pursuing a PhD degree under Prof. Howard Lee's supervision in association with the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University. Dr. Lee is the first PhD student who has ever graduated from CCADD. The title of her thesis was "Mechanistic Physiologically based Pharmacokinetic/Pharmacodynamic Models to Evaluate the Mutual Relationship between an Acid Pump Antagonist and Intragastric pH in Humans (Using YH4808, a novel K⁺-competitive acid blocker, as an example)".

Dr. Lee will stay with CCADD at least an additional year as a BK21 Plus postdoctoral researcher. She will be performing research in the areas of physiologically-based pharmacokinetic modeling, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamics (PK/PD) modeling and simulation, and artificial intelligence-based PK/PD modeling and simulation in clinical drug development. 

On April 24, 2019, Prof. Howard Lee and 5 CCADD members presented a seminar at the Laboratory of Genome Epidemiology and Health Big Data (G-Epi), Graduate School of Public Health at Seoul National University. It was a return visit in response to G-Epi's one 10 months ago. G-Epi (PI: Joohon Sung) focuses on the data analysis of genetic, demographic, physiological, and environmental factors of complex diseases. G-Epi uses epidemiological, statistical, and bioinformatics approaches to analyze large-scale omics data.

In the seminar, Prof. Howard Lee introduced G-Epi to one of the CCADD's current Artificial Intelligence (AI) research projects, entitled 'A dimensionality reduction model to increase the efficacy and accuracy of clinical trial feasibility assessment using electronic medical records.' Hyun A Lee and Dr. Jeong-An Kim also spoke about their research projects, a PBPK modeling analysis of an acid-reducing agent under clinical development and a pharmacoepigenomic analysis of Tacrolimus, respectively. The seminar was a great opportunity for both labs to share their research experiences, ideas, and future perspectives. G-Epi and CCADD are looking forward to closely working together in various research projects in the future. 

Prof. Howard Lee was invited to speak at an educational seminar and an international symposium, both sponsored by the Pharmaceutical Society of Korea, in association of its spring convention, held in the Millennium Hilton Seoul, Korea, on April 25-26. The PSK is an academic organization representing pharmacy since its foundation in 1946, which has grown into the biggest institution for pharmacists in Korea. In the educational seminar, Prof. Lee talked about how bio-big data can be used for the efficient planning and conduct of clinical drug development. His talk was based on his experience and lessons learned in the two recent research projects that CCADD led and will be actively participating, i.e., ACTRiS and SUCCESS. His presentation has received media attention as summarized in a newspaper article.   

The international symposium was held on the second day of the convention. Prof. Lee introduced the audience to several possible applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to clinical trials, with a special focus on a CCADD research project using feature selection for clinical trial feasibility. This symposium was organized by Prof. Hwi-yeol Yun, Chungnam National University College of Pharmacy, a long-time friend and collaborator of Prof. Lee's.   

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 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. 

Two scientists from Samsung SDS, Mr. Jaeho Yang, Principal Engineer (Sr. Expert), IoT Lab, and Dr. Sunghoon Joo, PhD, Senior Engineer, Advance Research Lab, visited CCADD on August 24, 2018 to have a joint seminar. In this joint seminar, Prof. Howard Lee gave an overview of the research projects CCADD has performed in the area of applying the artificial intelligence (AI) technology to clinical drug development, entitled with 'AI-enriched Clinical Trials'. Prof. Lee emphasized how AI could streamline various research activities pertaining to clinical trials, one of which is patient enrollment. For example, it is important to know who did what and how before planning any clinical trial, which is the main theme of the grant that the Korea Clinical Trials Global Initiative or KCGI has recently awarded CCADD, named 'AI-based Clinical Trial Resource Integration System or ACTRiS',

Following Prof. Lee's presentation, Mr. Yang introduced CCADD to the core concepts of several AI technologies and their potentials in drug discovery. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and autoencoding (AE) were a few examples Mr. Yang put emphasis on during his presentation. After that, Dr. Joo expanded further on several research projects Samsung SDS has conducted to design new molecules for drug discover in silico using advanced AI technologies such as molecular graphs and AE. Collectively, Mr. Yang and Dr. Joo showed how AI could fasten the discovery of new drug candidates that are likely to maintain excellent bio-physico-chemical properties, which may save time, resources, and costs in the whole drug development program. 

CCADD and Samsung SDS agreed to continue looking for a cadre of collaboration and joint research opportunities that may benefit both organizations.   

Two senior undergraduate students (Left: Hee Chang Lim, Right: Eun Gyung Kim) will be spending the next eight weeks (July-August 2018) at CCADD, participating in the summer internship program at the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology, Seoul National University. 

Hee Chang is a 4th year undergraduate student at the College of Liberal Studies, Seoul National University. He is majoring in Economics and Electrical Engineering. Hee Chang's research interests include how big data and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can design safer clinical trials. He is looking forward to working as a team member of the CCADD's current research project, named AI-based on Clinical Trial Resource Integration System (ACTRiS). 

Eun Gyung is also a senior, currently enrolled in the School of Natural Science, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), majoring in Chemistry. She wants to study further on theoretical and computational methods to describe and predict bio-molecular dynamics between proteins, drugs, and other bio-systems. In addition, she has developed a broad interest in computer-aided drug modeling and design. 

Let us join welcoming the two amazing student interns, and wishing them a hot summer to achieve many and have fun!