Student, Professor Receive Medical Informatics Association’s Best Paper Award

December 18, 2017

Travis Goodwin BS’11, MS’13, a computer science PhD student at UT Dallas, and Dr. Sanda Harabagiu, professor of computer science and Research Initiation Chair in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, received the Homer R. Warner Award at the 2017 American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) Annual Symposium.

The award recognizes a symposium paper that best describes approaches to improving computerized information acquisition, knowledge data acquisition and management, and experimental results documenting the value of these approaches.

Goodwin was lead author of “Inferring Clinical Correlations from EEG Reports with Deep Neural Learning.” The paper presents a novel method for automatically extracting and analyzing the clinical correlations between findings documented in a neurological report and the overall clinical picture of the patient, which helps to mitigate misdiagnoses and improve patient care. The research was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, part of its Big Data to Knowledge program.

“Travis is an exceptionally creative student who shows incredible promise. I think he will be an excellent academic because of his creativity, his hard work and his effectiveness in being able to see what other people have not yet seen,” Harabagiu said.

This is the second year in a row that Goodwin received a prestigious award at a conference. In 2016, the paper “Medical Question Answering for Clinical Decision Support,” co-authored with Harabagiu, received the Best Student Paper Award from the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.

Goodwin earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from UT Dallas.