Juan Antonio Lossio-Ventura

About me

I work as a Research Scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. Within the NIH, I am a member of the Machine Learning Team based at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH-NIH).

My professional background encompasses expertise and research experience in the following areas, with a specific focus on their application in health and biomedicine: (1) data science, (2) natural language processing (NLP), (3) machine learning, and (4) knowledge bases.

Moreover, I am deeply committed to promoting the advancement of computer science in Latin America, with a particular focus on Peru. In pursuit of this mission, I took part in co-founding SIMBig (the International Conference on Information Management and Big Data) in 2014. SIMBig has established itself as a leading conference in Latin America, focusing on crucial topics such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and more.

Experience

National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Current position)
Stanford University
University of Florida
Xerox Research Centre Europe (now Naver Labs)
Alcatel Lucent – Bell Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs)
Orange - France Télécom
Touring y Automóvil Club del Perú

Education

I got my PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Montpellier, France, working at LIRMM (Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics of Montpellier). My advisors were Clement Jonquet, Mathieu Roche, and Maguelonne Teisseire.

I did a research visit in July-August 2015 at the University of Manchester - NaCTeM, United Kingdom, under the supervision of Sophia Ananiadou.

I have a Master degree in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems from INSA Lyon and from the University of Lyon 1, France. I have a Master degree in Business Intelligence and Statistics from the University of Lyon 2 and I also have an Engineering degree in Computer Science from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru.

Research

Projects

SIFR Project
This project had for objective to investigate the scientific and technical challenges in building ontology-based services to leverage biomedical knowledge in indexing, mining and retrieval of biomedical data. The project will specifically address the issues related to the processing of French biomedical data in collaboration with NCBO (Stanford University). The fields related to this work are Natural Language Processing, Text Mining and Semantic Web.
BIrthDAY Consortium
This project aims at providing new efficient decision making tools for helping agricultural development as well as biodiversity protection in Peru. More precisely it aims at developing a new platform for helping to acquire new data, to share data, to extract knowledge, and to share useful information and knowledge among different actors that are involved in agriculture or biodiversity domains in Peru.
BioTex - A system that extracts biomedical terms from free text. The terminology is ranked using different measures (2014-2015).

Patent

Targeted Summarization of Medical Data Based on Implicit Queries: A system and method for targeted summarization of a patient’s electronic medical records. A component transforms the health records of the patient into representations in a multidimensional search space (2013-2014).

Awards

Best #COVID19 project, $5,000 prize from Google in a competition organized by Stanford Biodesign for Biodesign, Stanford University, Sep 2020. #HomeDerm, telemedicine app for the elderly to facilitate clinical care from the comfort of their home (more info)
Postdoctoral grant of $27,963 from the research program of the Institute of Informatics at the University of Florida in 2017/2018.
Funding of $1,000 from the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) for the SIMBig 2023 conference.
Funding of $1,500 from the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) for the SIMBig 2022 conference.
Funding of $1,000 from the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) for the SIMBig 2018 conference.
Funding of $500 from Google for the SIMBig 2018 conference.
IEEE BIBM 2016 student travel award.
Award for professional excellence in Computer Science by National University of San Marcos, Peru.
Best Mini-Project (Hospital Finder) - 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW 2013).
Scholarships for research studies from FINCyT programs, in Peru, the last one obtained in 2013.
Different Chess Trophy & Awards (2000-2004).

Professional Activities

Co-founder of SIMBig conference: International Conference on Information Management and Big Data.
Head of the BIrthDAY consortium: BIg Data for Agriculture and biodiversitY.
General co-chair of SIMBig 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.
General co-organizer of EnGeoData 2023, 2021, 2020, and 2019.
General co-chair of the Special Session "Learning from heterogeneous data analytics (EAST'2017)" - FLAIRS 2017 - AAAI.
Organizing committee of the 19th International Conference on Application of Natural Language to Information Systems - NLDB 2014, Montpellier, France.
Local helper for chairs of the 10th European Semantic Web Conference - ESWC 2013, Montpellier, France.

Invited Seminar Presentations

(to be updated)

2015-2023: TED talk and others
2015: Invited speaker at the Seminar on Big Data, Data Mining - 2015, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru.
2015: Invited speaker at the Seminar on Data Mining - 2015, Universidad de Pacífico, Lima, Peru.
2015: Invited speaker at the International Seminar on Data Mining - 2015, Universidad Tecnológica del Perú, Lima, Peru.
2014: Invited speaker at the 1st Workshop on Pattern Recognition and Applied Artificial Intelligence - WRPIAA 2014, Lima, Peru.

Publications

Lists of my publications:

Teaching

Data Science - Python
Period: 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 (Lecture and Tutorial)
PhD, Master students, at the University of Florida, U.S.A.
Advanced Web Programming - PHP
Period: 2014-2015 (Tutorial)
Bachelor (second year), at the University Institute of Technology in Béziers (IUT Béziers)
Web Development - PHP
Period: 2014-2015 (Tutorial)
Bachelor (first year), at the University Institute of Technology in Béziers (IUT Béziers)
Data Mining
Period: 2013-2014 (Projects)
Master (first year), at the Faculty of Science - University of Montpellier
Databases and Information Systems
Period: 2013-2014 (Tutorial)
Bachelor (third year), at the Faculty of Science - University of Montpellier
NoSQL Databases
Period: 2013-2014 (Lecture and Tutorial)
Master (second year), at the École Privée des Sciences Informatiques (EPSI)
Subjects: Introduction, The NoSQL-Movement, Basic Concepts, Techniques and Patterns Key-/Value-Stores, Document Databases (ApacheCouchDB, MongoDB), Column-Oriented Databases (Cassandra).
Algorithmics and Programmation
Period: 2013-2014 (Tutorial)
Bachelor (first year), at the Faculty of Science - University of Montpellier
Database Administration, ORACLE 11g
Period: 2012-2013 (Lecture and Tutorial)
Master (first year), at the École Privée des Sciences Informatiques (EPSI)
Subjects: Data Dictionary, User's administration, Privileges, Physical and logical structures, Disk files, System Global Area, Library cache, Data dictionary cache, Program Global Area, User processes, connections and sessions, Concurrency and locking.