Title: Enhancing Access to the Bibliome:  The TREC Genomics Track

Streaming video: [Windows Media format]

Slide set: [Adobe PDF format]

Abstract: New “high throughput” technologies have led to a fundamental change in the conduct of biomedical research.  These technologies, exemplified by the gene expression microarray, generate substantial amounts of data.  The discovery that several genes are differentially regulated in a disease process generates a need for the researcher to seek information about those genes, their products, and the biological processes in which they are involved.  These information needs require us to build better information retrieval (IR) systems to search the biomedical literature and other databases.  This talk will describe an initiative whose goal is to build better IR systems through the development of standardized test collections that allow comparative evaluation of systems and algorithms with a common data set.  The talk will provide an overview of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) and describe the methods and results of the Genomics Track within it.

Bio: William Hersh, M.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA.  Dr. Hersh is a leader in the IR field, both within medicine and generally.  He has published over 100 scientific papers as well as the book, Information Retrieval:  A Health and Biomedical Perspective (Springer-Verlag, 2003).  Dr. Hersh also serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Information Retrieval and is a member of the TREC Program Committee.  In addition, he directs the graduate educational programs in biomedical informatics at OHSU.  More information can be found about him on his Web site at www.billhersh.info.

Dr. Hersh is a native of Chicago, Illinois.  He received his Bachelor of Science in General Biology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1980, followed by a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1984.  After completing a three-year residency in internal medicine at University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago from 1984-1987, he did a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in medical informatics at Harvard University from 1987-1990.  He then joined the faculty of the School of Medicine at OHSU, where he has been the catalyst behind the development of the institution’s academic medical informatics program.