Apologies for Cross-Posting
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Dear colleagues:

The 3rd International Workshop on Semantics-Powered Data Analytics (SEPDA 2018) will be held on December 3, 2018 (tentative date) in Madrid, Spain, in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM 2018). 

We are now inviting original research submissions (FULL 8 pages), work-in-progress (SHORT 4 pages), and poster abstracts (2 pages, NEW TYPE).

All the accepted submissions will be presented in SEPDA 2018 and published in the IEEE BIBM 2018 Proceedings (in IEEE Xplore Digital Library); Selected FULL/SHORT papers will be invited to publish an extended version in the supplement of BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making (IF: 2.134; Indexed in SCIE, MEDLINE, and PMC; and subject to an article processing charge of USD $1,465).


Overview and Previous Workshops
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Biomedical ontologies and controlled terminologies provide structured domain knowledge to a variety of health information systems. The rich thesaurus with concepts linked by semantic relationships has been widely used in natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, semantic annotation, and automated reasoning. The dramatically increasing amount of health-related data poses unprecedented opportunities for mining previously unknown knowledge with semantics-powered data analytics methods. However, due to the heterogeneity of different data sources, it is a challenging problem to exploit multiple sources to solve real-world problems such as designing cost-effective treatment plan for patients, designing generalizable clinical trials, drug repurposing, and clinical phenotyping. The goal of this workshop is to bring people in the field of knowledge representation, knowledge management, and health data analytics to discuss innovative semantic methods, applications, and data analytics to address problems in healthcare, biomedicine, public health, and clinical research with biomedical, clinical, behavioral, and social web data.

The 1st SEPDA workshop (SEPDA 2016) was held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2016 in Shenzhen, China. SPEDA 2016 was a half-day workshop. Dr. Hua Xu, a leading expert in the field of Biomedical Informatics, gave the keynote speech on the bioCADDIE project. Eight quality papers were presented. Selected papers were invited to publish the extended version to the special issue on "Semantics-Powered Healthcare Engineering and Data Analytics" in the Journal of Healthcare Engineering (IF: 1.26).

The 2nd SEPDA Workshop (SEPDA 2017) was held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2017 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. SPEDA 2017 was a full day workshop. 17 high quality papers were presented in the workshop. 13 extended journal version of the papers was published in BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making (IF: 2.13).

Scope of the Workshop
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We are inviting original research submissions as well as work-in-progress.

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

Ontologies and Controlled Terminologies
Ontology development and enrichment
Quality assurance of ontologies and controlled terminologies
Semantic harmonization and ontology alignment
Knowledge representation and reasoning

Semantics-based Data Analytics
Ontology-based text mining and natural language processing
Ontology-based analysis on biomedical, clinical, or social web data
Information Extraction on biomedical, clinical, or social web data
Data mining or machine learning on biomedical, clinical or social web data
Semantic annotation on biomedical, clinical or social web data

Data Integration
Linked open data
Novel approaches for data integration of heterogenous data sources
Large scale data integration

Application
Novel tools and ontologies for data interpretation and visualization
Pharmacovigilance and drug repurposing using ontologies
Clinical trial generalizability assessment using ontologies
Algorithmic phenotyping and cohort identification using ontologies
Improving the literacy of health information consumers

Important Dates
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Oct 7, 2018: Due date for full / work-in-progress workshop papers submission

Oct 27, 2018: Notification of paper acceptance to authors

Nov 15, 2018: Camera-ready of accepted papers

Dec 3, 2018 (tentative): SEPDA 2018 Workshop

Journal submission deadline: TBD

Submission
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Please submit a full-length paper (up to 8 page IEEE 2-column format) through the online submission system (you can download the format instruction here ). Electronic submissions (in PDF or Postscript format) are required. Selected participants will be asked to submit their revised papers in a format to be specified at the time of acceptance. For relevant papers submitted to the main conference, you can indicate SEPDA 2018 as a backup workshop so that your rejected main conference papers will be reconsidered for SEPDA 2018.

Submission site:

https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2018/bibm18/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S07&undisplay_detail=1&wh=/cyberchair/2018/bibm18/scripts/ws_submit.php


Organizing
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Organizing Committee
Zhe He, School of Information, Florida State University, USA
Cui Tao, School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA
Rui Zhang, Institute for Health Informatics, University of Minnesota, USA
Jiang Bian, Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, University of Florida, USA

Program Committee
GQ Zhang, University of Kentucky, USA
Guoqian Jiang, Mayo Clinic, USA
Jake Luo, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA
James Cimino, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Licong Cui, University of Kentucky, USA
Xia Jing, Ohio University, USA
Riccardo Miotto, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA
Fleur Mougin, University of Bordeaux, France
Yonghui Wu, University of Florida, USA
Yi Guo, University of Florida
Buzhou Tang, Intelligent Computing Research Center, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen, China
Zhengxing Huang, Zhejiang University, China
Feichen Shen, Mayo Clinic