There is a critical need for tools to understand the influence of healthcare social networks on sustained weight loss.

Fortunately, professor Dejing Dou has just such a tool – it’s called SMASH.

SMASH stands for Semantic Mining of Activity, Social and Health data. Research in the design and implementation of this system will address a critical need for formal ontologies, data mining, graph mining, and privacy preserving tools to help understand the influence of healthcare social networks on sustained weight loss, where the data are multi-dimensional, temporal, semantically heterogeneous and very sensitive.

Dejing Dou is the leader of a multi-disciplinary SMASH team that was recently awarded a 3-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences, entitled "Understanding the Mechanism of Social Network Influence in Health Outcomes through Multidimensional and Semantic Data Mining Approaches."

The SMASH project began in 2010 as a collaboration with PeaceHealth’s YesiWell project, later expanding to include research groups from Kent State University and University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

Dejing Dou, an expert in ontologies, semantic data mining, and data integration, oversees a team that includes Brigitte Piniewski, chief medical officer at PeaceHealth Laboratories and the lead of YesiWell; Ruoming Jin, an expert in graph mining, social network and big data analysis at Kent State University; Xintao Wu, an expert in privacy preserving mining at UNC; Jessica Greene, an expert in health policy and online intervention at the UO and George Washington University; Daniel Lowd, an expert in statistical machine learning at the UO; Consultant David Kil, previously chief scientist at SKT Americas and program manager of YesiWell; and Junfeng Sun, a mathematical statistician at the NIH and an expert in the design of clinical trials.

- from UO Computer and Information Science