Events

September 29, 2015 at 1:30 p.m. Dr. Wei Shi, Assistant professor at the faculty of Business and I.T. in the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University, will be presenting “Geographic Partitioning Techniques for the Anonymization of Health Care Data (Big data and advanced analytics methods to ensure privacy)”. Speaker: Dr. Wei Shi Assistant professor at the faculty of Business and I.T. in the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University. Day & Time: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Location: Eric Palin Hall Ryerson University Room: EPH207 87 Gerrard Street East, Toronto, Ontario Click here to see the Map – Look for EPH Organizer: IEEE Toronto Systems Chapter Contact: E-mail: Alexei Botchkarev Registration: Registration is free, but space is limited. Please register via this link: http://tinyurl.com/systemsEvent Abstract: Hospitals and health care organizations collect large amounts of detailed health care data that is in high demand by researchers. Thus, the possessors of such data are in need of methods that allow for this data to be released without compromising the confidentiality of the individuals to whom it pertains. As the geographic aspect of this data is becoming increasingly relevant for research being conducted, it is important for an anonymization process to pay due attention to the geographic attributes of such data. In this talk, a novel system for health care data anonymization is presented. At the core of the system is the aggregation of an initial regionalization guided by the use of a Voronoi diagram. We conduct a comparison with another geographic-based system of anonymization, GeoLeader. We show that our system is capable of producing results of a comparable quality with a much faster running time. Biography: Dr. Wei Shi is an assistant professor at the faculty of Business and I.T. in the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University. Dr. Shi received her BEng. in Computer Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in China and MSC and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include big data analytics, algorithm design and analysis for distributed environments such as the cloud, wireless sensor network, mobile network as well as vehicular network. She has published over 40 technical papers in top conferences and journals. Her research work is supported by IBM and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.

October 22, 2015 at 12:00 p.m. Dr. Ebrahim Bagheri, Associate Professor and the Director for the Laboratory for Systems, Software and Semantics (LS3) at Ryerson University, will be presenting “Modeling Semantics of Content on Twitter (What did you mean when you said Yoyo!)”. Speaker: Dr. Ebrahim Bagheri Associate Professor and the Director for the Laboratory for Systems, Software and Semantics (LS3) at Ryerson University. Day & Time: Thursday, October 22, 2015 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Location: Kerr Hall West 379 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario Ryerson University Room: KHW057 Map – http://www.ryerson.ca/maps – Look for KHW Organizer: IEEE Systems Chapter – Toronto Section Contact: E-mail: Alexei Botchkarev Registration: Registration is free, but space is limited. Please register via this link: http://tinyurl.com/systems-Oct-22 Abstract: The microblogging service, Twitter, has gained wide popularity with over 300M active users and over 500M tweets per day. The unique characteristic of Twitter, only allowing short length messages to be communicated, has brought about interesting changes to how information is expressed and communicated by the users, i.e., the semantics of information when expressed on Twitter differ from when expressed on other medium. For instance, the word ‘metal’ when observed on Twitter carries a different semantic meaning, most likely referring to heavy metal music, as opposed to when used in other contexts where its predominant sense is the metal material. In this talk, I will discuss how the meaning and senses of words can be captured and modeled on Twitter to enable better and more efficient search, retrieval and recommendation of content. Biography: Ebrahim Bagheri is an Associate Professor and the Director for the Laboratory for Systems, Software and Semantics (LS3) at Ryerson University, and has been active in the areas of the Semantic Web and Software Engineering. He was one of the research theme leaders of the national project on Radiation Emission Monitoring at the National Research Council Canada and was responsible for leading the development of the Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering components of that project. In 2011, he co-chaired the Canadian Semantic Web Conference in Vancouver, BC (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-774/). His work on Semantic-Driven Information Extraction has resulted in two provisionally patented technologies namely Denote and Derive. Denote is a semantic annotation platform based on Linked Open Data and Derive is an extensible architecture for unsupervised knowledge extraction and object (concept and property-value pair) population from the Web. He has been involved in projects that encompass the use of Semantic Web technologies in the areas of e-commerce and business process modeling funded by NSERC, AIF and IBM. Over the past 5 years, he has led projects worth over $5M CAD including various NSERC research and development projects with over 12 industrial partners. He is a senior member of IEEE, an IBM Faculty Fellow and a member of PEO.