On Wednesday May 19 at 5.30 pm, Dr. Antoine Doucet, University of Caen, and Dr. Roman Yangarber, University of Helsinki, will introduce the collaboration in the PULS-Project on the application of news surveillance to epidemic surveillance.
News surveillance is a technology designed to provide automated understanding of plain text in natural human language, such as news streams, and to extract specific items of information from the text. For example, in epidemiological surveillance, this means not only finding articles on the Web about outbreaks of epidemics, but also analysing specifically who was affected, with what condition/disease, where, when, with what consequences. Epidemic surveillance has become a crucial tool with recent fast-spreading crises such as SARS, avian flu, and H1N1. Users include health authorities at national and supranational levels (ECDC, WHO).
PULS is a project at the University of Helsinki which develops text-understanding technology. For epidemic surveillance, PULS collaborates with the Medical Information System, MedISys, built at the European Joint Research Centre in Italy. Until recently, PULS focused only on English-language news, which limited the coverage of the system. The collaboration with the French ISLand team of the GREYC laboratory aims to extend the coverage to French. The French-Finnish collaboration, initiated in 2009, resulted in an extension of PULS, and is showing good promise for other languages such as Russian, Spanish and Chinese.
Dr. Antoine Doucet
Dr. Roman Yangarber
This Café will be the last of the season, we’ll meet again in September!
You can receive regular information on the Café Scientifique lecture series by sending an email to cafescientifique(at)france.fi.
Français