Background & Research Interests
I am a Senior Lecturer in Digital Health at the University of
Melbourne's School of Computing
& Information Systems and the Centre
for Digital Transformation of Health. My
research interests are centred on the application of
computational methods — particularly natural language
processing — to public health research questions, with
much of my research output focused on the broad areas of
communicable diseases, mental health, and substance
use. In addition to my computational work, I also
publish on ethical and socio-technical issues associated
with the development of digital health technologies.
My research has been funded by the United States National
Institutes of Health (National Library of
Medicine and National Institute on
Drug Abuse).
Prior to joining the University of Melbourne in 2021, I
held research positions at the University of Pittsburgh,
Mayo Clinic, the
University
of California San Diego, and the University
of Utah.
News
Sep 2024
- Co-organized the University of Melbourne and Hokkaido
University Workshop
on Advancing Digital Health & Medical AI with
Prof
Katsuhiko Ogasawara and colleagues at the
University of Hokkaido in Sapporo with presentations
from Prof
Kas Thursky, Dr Abe
Kasuhiro, Dr
Hiroyuki Sugimori, Dr
Daniel Capurro, Mr Soki Maeda, Dr
Ren Togo, Dr
Ayako Yagahara, Mr
Daniel Cabrera Lozoya, and Dr
Vlada Rozova
- New publication: A theory-informed deep learning
approach to extracting and characterizing substance
use-related stigma in social media. Roesler,
Johnny, Conway, Chen. BMC Digital
Health. 2, 1 (2024)
- New publication: Generating mental health transcripts
with SAPE (Spanish Adaptive Prompt Engineering).
Lozoya, Berazaluce, Perches, Lúa, Conway,
D’Alfonso. NAACL (2024)
- New publication: The
use of NLP methods in Reddit to investigate opioid
use: scoping review. Almeida, Patton,
Conway, Gupta, Strathdee, Borquez. JMIR
Infodemiology 4, e51156 (2024)
May 2024
- Welcome to new PhD students Liuliu
Chen, Abir
Naskar, and Jemima
Kang
- Awarded grant to support joint University of
Melbourne/Hokkaido University workshop on Digital Health
& Medical AI
- New publication with masters student Damian
Curran on Similarity
ranking of case law using propositions as features
at the 16th Japanese Society for Artificial
Intelligence International Symposia in Hamamatsu,
Shizuouka (Japan). Damian's work was ranked 2nd
(out of 24) for Task 1 of the 2024 Competition on
Legal Information and Extraction/Entailment
(COLIEE-2024)
Dec 2023
Jul 2023
Two papers at MedInfo 2023 in Sydney, both with
collaborators at the University of Utah's Division of
Epidemiology:
- Development of a natural language processing system to
identify clinical documentation of electronic cigarette
use. Alba, Gan, Hu, Zhu, Duvall, Conway.
Proceedings of MedInfo 2023: The 19th World
Congress on Medical and Health Informatics
- Automatic extraction of skin and soft tissue infection
status from clinical notes. Rhoads, Christensen,
Westerdahl, Stevens, Chapman, Conway. Proceedings
of MedInfo 2023: The 19th World Congress on Medical
and Health Informatics
Jan 2023
- New grant with Dr Annie
Chen at the University of Washington: Using
narratives to identify stigma phenotypes - a
socio-ecological approach [National Institutes of
Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse - R21DA056684]
Dec 2022
- New publication: Perspectives
of the COVID-19 pandemic on Reddit: Comparative
natural language processing study of the United
States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
Hu, Conway. JMIR Infodemiology. 2, 2
(2022)
- New publication: Consumer-generated
discourse on cannabis as a medicine: Scoping review of
techniques. Khademi Habibabadi, Hallinan, Bonomo,
Conway. Journal of Medical Internet
Research. 24, 11 (2022)
- New publication: Social
media discourse and internet search queries on
cannabis as a medicine: A systematic review.
Khademi Habibabadi, Bonomo, Conway, Hallinan. MedRxiv
(2022)
- New grant with Dr
Jude Mikal at the University of Minnesota School
of Public health: Leveraging Natural Language
Processing and Machine Learning tools to identify
prodromal cognitive impairment in longitudinal social
media data [University of Minnesota Informatics
Institute Large Seed Grant]
July 2022
May 2022
Mar 2022
Jan 2022