Xintao Wu Awarded NIH Grant

Dr. Xintao Wu, Professor and Charles D. Morgan/Acxiom Graduate Research Chair in Computer Science and Computer Engineering, has received a subaward that is being supported with a three-year R01 grant titled “Understanding the Mechanism of Social Network Influence in Health Outcomes through Multidimensional and Semantic Data Mining Approaches. 

The R01 grant is an inter-disciplinary collaboration among researchers from the University of Oregon (lead), PeaceHealth Laboratories, Kent State University, George Washington University, and the University of Arkansas.  The project aims to address a critical need for data mining and big data analysis  tools to help understanding the influence of healthcare social networks on sustained weight loss.  The project is built upon the YesiWell data which contain physical activities, social activities, and biomarkers of 500 participants over 6 months and are stored in more than 100 tables.  The data are multi-dimensional, temporal, semantically heterogeneous, and very sensitive.  

Dr. Wu and his team at the University of Arkansas are developing novel differential privacy preservation solutions to protect privacy of human subjects in mining the sensitive health activities and social activities.  They are also collaborating actively with researchers in other institutions on the development of innovative analytical methods to address big data challenges of volume and variety.