Graduate Seminar: Towards Automatically Understanding Scientific Papers
Towards Automatically Understanding Scientific Papers
Dr. Jian Wu
Old Dominion University
Friday, November 11, 2022
2150 Torgersen Hall
Abstract
Scientific papers that carry new discoveries and innovations are key vehicles for researchers to communicate with each other. Since the end of World War II, the number of scientific papers has been increasing dramatically. Especially, the number of papers in artificial intelligence, biomedical science, and life science papers has been growing rapidly in the past decades, making it challenging for researchers and students in these fields to stay on top of recent publications. Traditional digital library search engines search massive amounts of scientific papers at scale but they are so far incapable of understanding these papers like humans do. Several important problems have drawn the attention of computer scientists, social scientists, and domain experts. From the macro perspective, this includes several key problems in a new field called the science of science, such as the trends of publication, collaboration, and available datasets and software. From the micro perspective, this involves extracting semantic information from individual papers and using them for improving models for information retrieval, classification, literature review, and combating disinformation. In this presentation, Dr. Wu will introduce the research his team has done to advance scholarly paper understanding using natural language processing and understanding, computer vision, and meta-science methods. Dr. Wu will outline the challenging questions and his ongoing efforts to solve them.
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Biography
Dr. Jian Wu is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Old Dominion University (ODU). He is the director of the lab for applied machine learning and natural language processing and a member of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group. Dr. Wu obtains his PhD degree from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Pennsylvania State University in 2011. After that, he joined the CiteSeerX project directed by Dr. C. Lee Giles and became the tech leader. Dr. Wu has published more than 70 papers in peer-reviewed conference proceedings and journals. Dr. Wu's research has been supported by NSF, IMLS, DARPA, and Virginia Commonwealth. Dr. Wu's collaborators are from national laboratories and universities, including Los Alamos National Labs, Pennsylvania State University, Virginia Tech, and Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Wu won the ODU Alumni Association New Faculty Award in 2022. He shared the British Computer Society Award for the Best Open Source Project with Dr. C. Lee Giles in 2021.