July 1, 2022 I started my journey to Harvard University, Department of Biomedical Informatics. I stayed in Boston until October 6, 2022. My visit was mainly due to research reasons for my bilateral project between University of Ljubljana and Harvard University (prof. Marinka Žitnik).
Zitnik Lab, led by Marinka Žitnik mainly deals with AI in the field of medicine. I was also cooperating with her post-docs. Our project was titled “Multi-modal temporal relation extraction.” Together with my PhD candidate, Timotej Knez, we skeched a research plan for collaboration (see Figure below).
Timotej is working on temporal relation extraction from raw texts, more precisely from medical discharge texts. We have got access to some additinal datasets and also used a knowledge graphs, developed by the Marinka’s group.
During my stay I also visited MTERMS lab, led by Li Zhou. Her group is focused into NLP in medical domain. As I was visiting professor at Harvard, I also joined some of their group meetings, got access to some additional datasets and set up collaboration for the future.
Timotej prepared a review paper on time-aware relation extraction, where we addressed the following questions:
- What are the useful data sources (we would also need access; see below) and how to efficiently encode them into a knowledge graph?
- How to represent time-based relationships and what is the resolution? There are some approached, maybe combination, e.g., before/after, relative time spans, or fixed times and dates.
- How to build a GNN-based embeddings and show performance in temporal relationships prediction.
- How to build a large time-aware knowledge graph based on the approach above and perform inferences based on its data to provide new insights or knowledge (e.g., patient illness/medication dosage progress).
I got access to all Harvard activities. I attended cooking classes. It was interesting that you apply for a workshop, get groceries to a Harvard office and then cook at home via video conference (it was still end of Covid pandemic at that time). During my stay Marinka was awarded best mentor award and the ceremony was fabulous!
Free time activities
Boston offers many options to spend your free time. During my stay I did the following:
Visited museums and landmarks: Museum Of Fine Arts, MIT Museum, Harvard’s museums, John F Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, beaches (Fort, Revere, Carson), Boston Commons, Charles Esplanade, …
My focus was also healthy living and sport. I joined the Heartbreak running club – I ran three times per week with them (MIT Stadium, Boston center and long run in weekends).
