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Seminar Series: Dr. Abeed Sarker
October 21, 2024 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Dr. Sarker is an Associate Professor and the Vice Chair for Research at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Emory University. He leads several large-scale projects focusing on the application of NLP for health-related tasks, particularly those involving vulnerable populations such as people with substance use disorders, victims of intimate partner violence, and people at risk of self-harm and suicide. His research is primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Sarker’s research has been covered by various national and international media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Scripps National News.
Location: BLOC 220 and Zoom
Zoom ID: 974 9688 4861
Passcode: 923446
Social Media Mining for Substance Use Research
The epidemic of substance use (SU) and substance use disorder (SUD) in the United States has been evolving for decades. Both prescription and illicit drugs have been involved in overdose deaths over the years, with notable increases in synthetic opioids (eg., fentanyl & analogs) and psychostimulants (eg., methamphetamine) in recent years. A key element to tackling the crisis is improved surveillance. Specifically, there is a need for establishing novel approaches to provide timely insights about the trends, distributions, and trajectories of the SUD epidemic, as traditional surveillance approaches involve considerable lags. In this talk, I will highlight our ongoing and past work on developing NLP and machine learning methods for effectively leveraging social media data for substance use research.