Katy Börner

Yongzhen Wang, Xiaozhong Liu, Katy Börner et al.

Objective: Ubiquitous internet access is reshaping the way we live, but it is accompanied by unprecedented challenges in preventing chronic diseases that are usually planted by long exposure to unhealthy lifestyles. This paper proposes leveraging online shopping behaviors as a proxy for personal lifestyle choices to improve chronic disease prevention literacy, targeted for times when e-commerce user experience has been assimilated into most people's everyday lives. Methods: Longitudinal query logs and purchase records from 15 million online shoppers were accessed, constructing a broad spectrum of lifestyle features covering various product categories and buyer personas. Using the lifestyle-related information preceding online shoppers' first purchases of specific prescription drugs, we could determine associations between their past lifestyle choices and whether they suffered from a particular chronic disease. Results: Novel lifestyle risk factors were discovered in two exemplars--depression and type 2 diabetes, most of which showed reasonable consistency with existing healthcare knowledge. Further, such empirical findings could be adopted to locate online shoppers at higher risk of these chronic diseases with decent accuracy [i.e., (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) AUC=0.68 for depression and AUC=0.70 for type 2 diabetes], closely matching the performance of screening surveys benchmarked against medical diagnosis. Conclusions: Mining online shopping behaviors can point medical experts to a series of lifestyle issues associated with chronic diseases that are less explored to date. Hopefully, unobtrusive chronic disease surveillance via e-commerce sites can grant consenting individuals a privilege to be connected more readily with the medical profession and sophistication.

Kylie Peppler, Joey Huang, Michael C. Richey et al.

Effective adoption of online platforms for teaching, learning, and skill development is essential to both academic institutions and workplaces. Adoption of online learning has been abruptly accelerated by COVID19 pandemic, drawing attention to research on pedagogy and practice for effective online instruction. Online learning requires a multitude of skills and resources spanning from learning management platforms to interactive assessment tools, combined with multimedia content, presenting challenges to instructors and organizations. This study focuses on ways that learning sciences and visual learning analytics can be used to design, and to improve, online workforce training in advanced manufacturing. Scholars and industry experts, educational researchers, and specialists in data analysis and visualization collaborated to study the performance of a cohort of 900 professionals enrolled in an online training course focused on additive manufacturing. The course was offered through MITxPro, MIT Open Learning is a professional learning organization which hosts in a dedicated instance of the edX platform. This study combines learning objective analysis and visual learning analytics to examine the relationships among learning trajectories, engagement, and performance. The results demonstrate how visual learning analytics was used for targeted course modification, and interpretation of learner engagement and performance, such as by more direct mapping of assessments to learning objectives, and to expected and actual time needed to complete each segment of the course. The study also emphasizes broader strategies for course designers and instructors to align course assignments, learning objectives, and assessment measures with learner needs and interests, and argues for a synchronized data infrastructure to facilitate effective just in time learning and continuous improvement of online courses.

Katy Börner, Ellen M. Quardokus, Bruce W. Herr et al.

The National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) aims to create a comprehensive high-resolution atlas of all the cells in the healthy human body. Multiple laboratories across the United States are collecting tissue specimens from different organs of donors who vary in sex, age, and body size. Integrating and harmonizing the data derived from these samples and 'mapping' them into a common three-dimensional (3D) space is a major challenge. The key to making this possible is a 'Common Coordinate Framework' (CCF), which provides a semantically annotated, 3D reference system for the entire body. The CCF enables contributors to HuBMAP to 'register' specimens and datasets within a common spatial reference system, and it supports a standardized way to query and 'explore' data in a spatially and semantically explicit manner. [...] This paper describes the construction and usage of a CCF for the human body and its reference implementation in HuBMAP. The CCF consists of (1) a CCF Clinical Ontology, which provides metadata about the specimen and donor (the 'who'); (2) a CCF Semantic Ontology, which describes 'what' part of the body a sample came from and details anatomical structures, cell types, and biomarkers (ASCT+B); and (3) a CCF Spatial Ontology, which indicates 'where' a tissue sample is located in a 3D coordinate system. An initial version of all three CCF ontologies has been implemented for the first HuBMAP Portal release. It was successfully used by Tissue Mapping Centers to semantically annotate and spatially register 48 kidney and spleen tissue blocks. The blocks can be queried and explored in their clinical, semantic, and spatial context via the CCF user interface in the HuBMAP Portal.

Guoqing Zhu, Naga Anjaneyulu Kopalle, Yongzhen Wang et al.

How does your education impact your professional career? Ideally, the courses you take help you identify, get hired for, and perform the job you always wanted. However, not all courses provide skills that transfer to existing and future jobs; skill terms used in course descriptions might be different from those listed in job advertisements; and there might exist a considerable skill gap between what is taught in courses and what is needed for a job. In this study, we propose a novel method to integrate extensive course description and job advertisement data by leveraging heterogeneous data integration and community detection. The innovative heterogeneous graph approach along with identified skill communities enables cross-domain information recommendation, e.g., given an educational profile, job recommendations can be provided together with suggestions on education opportunities for re- and upskilling in support of lifelong learning.

Katy Börner, Olga Scrivner, Leonard E. Cross et al.

Understanding the emergence, co-evolution, and convergence of science and technology (S&T) areas offers competitive intelligence for researchers, managers, policy makers, and others. The resulting data-driven decision support helps set proper research and development (R&D) priorities; develop future S&T investment strategies; monitor key authors, organizations, or countries; perform effective research program assessment; and implement cutting-edge education/training efforts. This paper presents new funding, publication, and scholarly network metrics and visualizations that were validated via expert surveys. The metrics and visualizations exemplify the emergence and convergence of three areas of strategic interest: artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and internet of things (IoT) over the last 20 years (1998-2017). For 32,716 publications and 4,497 NSF awards, we identify their conceptual space (using the UCSD map of science), geospatial network, and co-evolution landscape. The findings demonstrate how the transition of knowledge (through cross-discipline publications and citations) and the emergence of new concepts (through term bursting) create a tangible potential for interdisciplinary research and new disciplines.

Felice De Luca, Iqbal Hossain, Kathryn Gray et al.

Human subject studies that map-like visualizations are as good or better than standard node-link representations of graphs, in terms of task performance, memorization and recall of the underlying data, and engagement [SSKB14, SSKB15]. With this in mind, we propose the Zoomable Multi-Level Tree (ZMLT) algorithm for multi-level tree-based, map-like visualization of large graphs. We propose seven desirable properties that such visualization should maintain and an algorithm that accomplishes them. (1) The abstract trees represent the underlying graph appropriately at different level of details; (2) The embedded trees represent the underlying graph appropriately at different levels of details; (3) At every level of detail we show real vertices and real paths from the underlying graph; (4) If any node or edge appears in a given level, then they also appear in all deeper levels; (5) All nodes at the current level and higher levels are labeled and there are no label overlaps; (6) There are no edge crossings on any level; (7) The drawing area is proportional to the total area of the labels. This algorithm is implemented and we have a functional prototype for the interactive interface in a web browser.

Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen, Katy Börner et al.

We show how faceted search using a combination of traditional classification systems and mixed-membership topic models can go beyond keyword search to inform resource discovery, hypothesis formulation, and argument extraction for interdisciplinary research. Our test domain is the history and philosophy of scientific work on animal mind and cognition. The methods can be generalized to other research areas and ultimately support a system for semi-automatic identification of argument structures. We provide a case study for the application of the methods to the problem of identifying and extracting arguments about anthropomorphism during a critical period in the development of comparative psychology. We show how a combination of classification systems and mixed-membership models trained over large digital libraries can inform resource discovery in this domain. Through a novel approach of "drill-down" topic modeling---simultaneously reducing both the size of the corpus and the unit of analysis---we are able to reduce a large collection of fulltext volumes to a much smaller set of pages within six focal volumes containing arguments of interest to historians and philosophers of comparative psychology. The volumes identified in this way did not appear among the first ten results of the keyword search in the HathiTrust digital library and the pages bear the kind of "close reading" needed to generate original interpretations that is the heart of scholarly work in the humanities. Zooming back out, we provide a way to place the books onto a map of science originally constructed from very different data and for different purposes. The multilevel approach advances understanding of the intellectual and societal contexts in which writings are interpreted.