Moderator: Syed Ahmad Chan Bukhari, Collins College of Professional Studies, Computer Science, Mathematics and Science
Speaker: Dr. Maulik Kamdar, Senior Data Scientist at Elsevier Health

Talk Summary:  The biomedical data landscape is fragmented with several isolated, heterogeneous data and knowledge sources, which use varying formats, syntaxes, schemas, and entity notations, existing on the Web. Biomedical researchers face severe logistical and technical challenges to query, integrate, analyze, and visualize data from multiple diverse sources in the context of available biomedical knowledge. To address these challenges, the biomedical research community has experimented with Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles to publish data and knowledge on the Web as linked knowledge graphs, often termed the Life Sciences Linked Open Data (LSLOD) cloud.  

In this talk, I will present some opportunities proffered by the use of LSLOD to integrate biomedical data and knowledge in the domains of pharmacology, cancer research, and infectious diseases. I will cover some of the major bottlenecks that hinder the wide-spread use and consumption of LSLOD by the wider biomedical research community, as observed through multiple systematic analyses conducted over biomedical ontologies and linked open data graphs across the LSLOD cloud. Finally, I will end with my perspective on the next directions and technical solutions to mitigate these bottlenecks.

Eventually, linked data and knowledge has the potential to enable the development of scalable, intelligent infrastructures that support artificial intelligence methods for augmenting human intelligence to achieve better clinical outcomes for patients, to enhance the quality of biomedical research, and to improve our understanding of living systems. 

Speaker Bio: Maulik Kamdar is a Senior Data Scientist at Elsevier Health and Commercial Markets. In his current role, Maulik has been working on the research and development on Elsevier’s Healthcare Knowledge Graph, on applications that can be powered through such a medical knowledge platform and has also led the Elsevier-Stanford collaboration to develop and improve upon the usability of the WebProtégé collaborative ontology editing platform for editing large-scale knowledge graphs by subject matter experts. His research interests are biomedical informatics, Semantic Web technologies, information retrieval, data visualization, interpretable machine learning, and operationalized data science.

Maulik completed his PhD research in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University on developing methods to retrieve, integrate, and analyze data and knowledge from multiple, heterogeneous biomedical sources for discovering novel associations in pharmacovigilance. For this research, Maulik has won the American Medical Informatics Association 2020 Dissertation Award and best paper awards at multiple conferences. Maulik has widely collaborated with researchers from several institutes on interdisciplinary projects, has published more than 30 papers in several venues, and has also been instrumental in the development of popular Web applications, such as the first prototypes of Data.Gov.IE and the Reactome.Org Pathway Browser through his previous roles at National University of Ireland Galway and the Reactome Consortium under the 2011-12 Google Summer of Code Program respectively. In his free time, Maulik loves to explore national parks and finish long runs across new cities and running trails.

Please join us at 2:00 pm by clicking the Webinar Link: https://sju.webex.com/sju/j.php?MTID=mfc58cd5860463c515ee5fb48e656ab94