Join the Media, Film and Communications program on Tuesday, April 25 from 5 to 8 pm for their annual media showcase titled, Empowering Hope. View student media, film and other artistic productions. Free hors d'oeuvres. Everyone welcome - in-person or on Zoom.
Please join the Computer Science Department for the upcoming thesis defense:
Presenter: Atharva Phatak
Thesis title: Medical Text Simplification: Bridging the Gap between Medical Research and Public Understanding
Abstract: Text Simplification is a subdomain of Natural Language Processing that focuses on applying computational techniques to modify the content and structure of the text to make it interpretable while retaining the main idea. The advancements in text simplification research have provided valuable benefits to a wide range of readers, including those with learning disabilities and non-native speakers. Moreover, even regular readers who are not experts in fields such as medicine or finance have found text simplification techniques to be useful in accessing scientific literature and research. This thesis aims to create a text simplification approach that can effectively simplify complex biomedical literature. Chapter 2 provides an insightful overview of the datasets, methods, and evaluation techniques used in text simplification. Chapter 3 conducts an extensive bibliometric analysis of literature in the field of text simplification to understand research trends, find important research and application topics of text simplification research, and understand shortcomings in the field. Based on the findings in Chapter 3, we found that the advancements in text simplification research can have a positive impact on the medical domain. The research in the field of medicine is constantly developing and contains important information about drugs and treatments for various life threatening diseases. Although this information is accessible to the public, it is very complex in nature, thus making it difficult to understand. To address this problem, chapter 4 proposes an Automatic Text Simplification approach called “TESLEA”, which is capable of simplifying text related to the medical domain. The proposed approach employs a transformer-based model and leverages reinforcement learning to train the model in optimizing rewards that are tailored to text simplification. The proposed method outperformed previous baselines on Flesch-Kincaid scores (11.84) and achieved comparable performance with other baselines when measured using ROUGE-1 (0.39), ROUGE-2 (0.11), and SARI scores (0.40). The analysis of human annotated data revealed a percentage agreement of over 70% among human annotators when evaluated factors such as fluency, coherence, and adequacy. While having proposed an approach for simplifying medical text, this research also identifies potential avenues for future investigation, specifically the development of multilingual text simplification systems catering to diverse domains
Committee Members:
Dr. Vijay Mago (supervisor, committee chair), Dr. Garima Bajwa, Dr. Ameeta Agrawal (Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, Portland State University)
Please contact grad.compsci@lakeheadu.ca for the Zoom link.
Everyone is welcome.
The Chemistry and Materials Science candidate, Shrikanta Sutradhar will present his research: Valorization kraft lignin via alkaline and acid-mediated aerobic oxidation process
Committee Members: Dr. Pedram Fatehi(supervisor), Dr. Ebrahim Rezaei, Dr. Kang Kang, Dr. Hongbin Liu (external), and Dr. Christine Gottardo (chair)
Everyone is welcome
For more information contact Brenda Magajna at phd.ses@lakeheadu.ca
Title: "Assessing the vulnerability of south-central Ontario’s maple syrup industry to climate change: A multidisciplinary approach"
Supervisory Committee:
- Dr. Gerardo Reyes (Supervisor)
- Dr. Nanda Kanavillil
- Dr. Sonia Mastrangelo
- Dr. Brian McLaren (External)
All are welcome to attend. Please contact biology@lakeheadu.ca for the meeting ID and password.
New Music Ensemble
Aris Carastathis, director
works by: D. Chepil Reid, A. Sloley, A. Carastathis, E. Vaitsi
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
8:00 pm, Jean McNulty Recital Hall
William H. Buset Centre for Music and Visual Arts
free admission
Lakehead University Wind Ensemble
Dino Pepe, director
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
6:00 pm, Jean McNulty Recital Hall
William H. Buset Centre for Music and Visual Arts
free admission
Please join us for Brittany Mascioli's, PhD Clinical Psychology, Final Doctoral Dissertation Defense on April 28th, 2023 beginning at 1:00pm via Zoom.
Dissertation Title: Effects of Gratitude and Cognitive Load on Delay Discounting: Replication Failures in Two Experiments
Supervisor: Dr. Ron Davis
Supervisory Committee Member: Dr. Dwight Mazmanian
Internal Examiner: Dr. Gordon Hayman
External Examiner: Dr. Andrea Patalano
GSC Rep: Dr. Amanda Maranzan
Please email grad.psych@lakeheadu.ca for the Zoom link and passcode.
Title: "Wetlands as filters of pollutants: A study from Central Ontario"
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Nandakumar Kanavillil (supervisor)
Dr. Peter Lee
Dr. Sreekumari Kurissery
All are welcome to attend. Please contact biology@lakeheadu.ca for meeting ID and password.
Please join us for Christiana Goetz Fidler's Final PhD Clinical Psychology Dissertation Defense on Wednesday May 3rd, beginning at 1:30pm via Zoom.
Dissertation Title: Stigma Resistance versus Self-Stigma in University Students with Mental Health Problems
Supervisor: Dr. Amanda Maranzan
Supervisory Committee Member: Dr. Mirella Stroink
Internal Examiner: Dr. Aislin Mushquash
External Examiner: Dr. Patrick Heath
GSC Rep: Dr. Gordon Hayman
Please email grad.psych@lakeheadu.ca for the Zoom link and passcode.
Lakehead University Student Juried Exhibition and Honours Graduating Show opened to the public on March 24 at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.
The Lakehead University Department of Visual Arts invites you to join us for the opening and award ceremonies on Friday March 31, 2023 in Thunder Bay Art Gallery. Doors open at 7 pm. There will be food and refreshments at the opening.
This year the opening ceremonies were emceed by Dr. Elizabeth Birmingham, Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities.
L.U student exhibits will be on display until Sunday April 23rd.
