Activity as a novel medical diagnostic tool – Dr. Elad Yom-Tov from Microsoft Research.

CS Colloquium talk by Dr. Elad Yom-Tov from Microsoft Research.

Title: Online activity as a novel medical diagnostic tool

Abstract: The majority of internet users report that they use the web to find information about their medical concerns. Data generated during this search process provides detailed insights into users’ interests and activities at high temporal resolution, as well as physiological and demographic attributes. Studies conducted over the past decade have demonstrated that these data could be used to screen for a variety of physical and mental diseases.

In my talk I will present the opportunities and challenges of using search data for medical diagnosis. I will discuss the difficulties, including the identification of a user cohort from anonymous data, building useful machine learning models, and providing pertinent information to users in ways that are both useful and ethical. I’ll propose solutions to these challenges and exemplify them through our work on detecting impending stroke, screening for diseases such as ALS, and using online ads to nudge people who are in need of medical help to relevant care. Based on our research and that of other groups working in this area, we suggest that online activity, especially search engine data, can serve as a novel medical diagnostic tool, augmenting current approaches.

Bio: Dr. Elad Yom-Tov is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Technion. Before joining Microsoft he was with Yahoo Research, IBM Research, and Rafael. Dr. Yom-Tov studied at Tel-Aviv University and the Technion. His primary research interests are in applying large-scale Machine Learning and Information Retrieval methods to medicine. He has published four books, over 150 papers (of which 3 were awarded prizes), and was awarded more than 30 patents. He is a Senior Member of ACM and IEEE. His latest book is “Crowdsourced Health: How What You Do on the Internet Will Improve Medicine” (MIT Press, 2016).