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Dr Bevan Koopman

Team Leader

https://people.csiro.au/k/b/bevan-koopman

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Biography

I'm a researcher focused on search and language technologies. I lead the Health Search team at the Australian e-Health Research Centre, CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) and I'm an Associate Professor in Language Technologies at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Univeristy of Queensland.

At its core, my research has been about helping people find relevant and reliable health information to make health related decisions.

From a clinical perspective then, my research is to tackle problems where people need to find answers and make clinical decisions in the face of overwhelming amounts of typically unstructured data. So that might be in evidence-based medicine, where clinicians need to search through vast amounts of literature and clinical trials to find a targeted treatment for a specific cancer. It can be automating the processing of matching and recruiting a patient to a clinical trials.

From a technical perspective, the key challenges here are 1) how to build models search through unstructured natural language; 2) understanding the semantics of someones query rather than just matching keywords; 3) how to inject medical domain knowledge into an AI model; 4) putting the human searcher in the loop so they can bring their domain knowledge to guide the model to relevant information; 5) the underlying techniques nowadays being training specific deep learning based ranking models.

For more details please see my homepage at http://www.koopman.id.au

Current Roles

  • Senior Research Scientist
    I lead a number of projects applying Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to real-world problems, mainly in the health domain. In IR, I contribute core research in ranking and matching methods, evaluation and user behaviour and understanding. In NLP and ML, I contribute the application of relevant technology to domain specific problems.

  • Associate Professor, The University of Queensland
    Leading language technology research as part of UQ's Health Research Accelerator Initiative.

Academic Qualifications

  • 2014

    PhD
    Queensland University of Technology

  • 2002

    BInfoTech(Hons I) UQ
    University of Queensland

We have publications by Dr Bevan Koopman