Subject Book: Reforming Data Management in Human Experiments

When: Friday, April 28, 2017
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM – Noon

Speaker: Dr. Ioannis Pavlidis, University of Houston

Host: Dr. Thamar Solorio

Data-driven research in human experiments constitutes a prominent segment of modern scientific inquiry. Such research carries significant impact, because it holds the key to understanding behaviors and illnesses. As the size, variety, and scope of data increase, it is becoming evident that the scientific method is strained, compromising the integrity and reproducibility of results in human-centered investigations. To address this issue, we have developed Subject Book, a communal software tool that reduces the massive multimodal data often standing between the experimental design and the hypothesis tests into a series of traceable and well-understood abstractions. Subject Book fulfills its mission through instant curation of data, multi-level visualization, and insistence on pre-planned tests. This curation-visualization-testing process, which represents the study lifecycle, has been automated, to suppress delays and data mismanagement. As a result, Subject Book produces efficient, high quality, and sharable data products that facilitate the scientific discourse.

Bio:

Dr. Pavlidis is the Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Computational Physiology Laboratory at the University of Houston. His research is funded by multiple agencies including the National Science Foundation, transportation organizations, and medical institutions. He has published largely in the areas of human-computer interaction, computational physiology, and the physiological basis of human behavior. He is well known for his work on the quantification of stress and its effect on critical human responses, which appeared in a series of articles in Nature, Lancet, and the Scientific Reports.