Tomasz Oliwa

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tomasz oliwa


Tomasz Oliwa


email: oliwa at {uchicago dot edu | ttic dot edu}




About me

I work in the Center for Research Informatics (CRI) at the
University of Chicago.

I am interested in all aspects of software engineering and practical applications of natural language processing and applied machine learning,
especially involving clinical / medical texts and data.

Before joining the CRI, I was a
postdoctoral scholar at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), located on the
campus of the University of Chicago.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Georgia, Athens, USA. My research was with
the Evolutionary Computation & Machine Learning (ECML) Lab.

In addition to that, I was also graduate student at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence under a scholarship
of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).

I studied Computer Science with a focus in Artificial Intelligence and a minor subject in Physics
at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany and finished with the degree Diplom-Informatiker.


Publications

2020

Tomasz Oliwa, Brian Furner, Jessica Schmitt, John Schneider, Jessica P Ridgway, Development of a predictive model
for retention in HIV care using natural language processing of clinical notes,
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, , ocaa220, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocaa220
PubMed-Link

2019

Obtaining Knowledge in Pathology Reports Through a Natural Language Processing Approach
With Classification, Named-Entity Recognition, and Relation-Extraction Heuristics
Tomasz Oliwa, Steven B. Maron, Leah M. Chase, Samantha Lomnicki, Daniel V.T. Catenacci, Brian Furner, and Samuel L. Volchenboum
JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics 2019 :3, 1-8, DOI: 10.1200/CCI.19.00008 , PMID: 31365274
Link PubMed-Link

2018

Steven Brad Maron, Smita Suhas Joshi, S Lomnicki, Tomasz Oliwa, Stacie Landron, Julie Johnson,
Lesli Ann Kiedrowski, Rebecca J Nagy, Richard B. Lanman, Yelena Yuriy Janjigian, Kaitlyn J. Kelly, Seung Tae Kim,
Jeeyun Lee, Daniel V.T. Catenacci, "Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) landscape and prognostic implications in
advanced gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma (GEC).",
Journal of Clinical Oncology 36, no. 4_suppl (February 2018) 45-45., DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2018.36.4_suppl.45
Abstract
Link

2015

Tomasz Oliwa and Yang Shen, "cNMA: a framework of encounter complex-based normal mode analysis
to model conformational changes in protein interactions." Bioinformatics 31.12 (2015): i151-i160.
Published by Oxford University Press. Link

2014


Tomasz Oliwa and Yang Shen, "A complex-based normal mode analysis for conformational changes upon
protein binding", 3DSIG 2014 Poster Abstract, Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics,
ISMB Satellite Meeting, Boston, USA, 2014.


2013

Tomasz Oliwa and Khaled Rasheed, "An overlapping variable linkage benchmark suite".
Proceedings of the 15th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation
(GECCO '13 Companion), Christian Blum (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-128.
BibTex - ACM Link - ACM Author-Izer PDF

2012

Tomasz Oliwa and Khaled Rasheed, "A Surrogate-Assisted and Informed Linkage Aware GA",
Proceedings of the 14th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation
(GECCO Companion '12), Terence Soule (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1467-1468.
BibTex - ACM Link - ACM Author-Izer PDF

2011

Tomasz Oliwa and Khaled Rasheed, "A surrogate-assisted linkage inference approach in genetic algorithms",
Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (GECCO 2011),
Natalio Krasnogor (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 997-1004.
BibTex - ACM Link - ACM Author-Izer PDF

2010

Tomasz Oliwa and Khaled Rasheed, "A Machine Learning Approach for Sensitivity Inference in Genetic Algorithms",
Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Methods (GEM'2010),
Las Vegas, USA, 2010.
BibTeX

2008

Tomasz Oliwa, "Genetic Algorithms and the abc Music Notation Language for Rock Music Composition",
Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (GECCO 2008),
ACM, New York, NY, 1603-1610.
BibTeX - ACM Link - ACM Author-Izer PDF

Tomasz Oliwa and Markus Wagner, "Composing Music with Neural Networks and Probabilistic Finite-State Machines",
Proceedings of the Sixth European Workshop on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design
(EvoMUSART 2008), Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, Springer, 503-508.
BibTeX - Springer LNCS 4974 - PDF
The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com.


Other Conference/Symposium Presentations

2019

Presentation
Brian Furner and Tomasz Oliwa, "Using NLP in Clinical Data Analytics", presented at the
CRI Seminar Series


2017

Presentation
Brian Furner and Tomasz Oliwa, "Using NLP in Clinical Data Analytics", presented at the
CRI Seminar Series

2014

Presentation
Tomasz Oliwa and Yang Shen, "On conformational changes associated with protein-protein interactions:
Normal mode analysis for encounter complexes", presented at the Protein Folding Conference 2014,
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic,
July 2014

2013

Presentation
Tomasz Oliwa, "Introduction to Evolutionary Computation", presented at the Center for Simulational Physics
seminar, Athens, GA, USA, March 2013

2012

Presentation
Tomasz Oliwa and Khaled Rasheed, "A surrogate-assisted and informed linkage aware GA",
presented at the Computer Science Advisory Board Poster Session, Athens, GA, USA, October 2012

2010

3rd place: Simulation Soccer Championship
"Bronze" Place Winner Award for developing a multi-agent virtual soccer team and competing in the Annual 2010
Simulation Soccer Championship in CSCI 8220 Advanced Simulation Systems.

2009

1st place: Best Poster Award (from 41 accepted posters)
Best Poster Award, Tomasz Oliwa, "Music Composition with Artificial Intelligence", poster presentation at the
UGA Computer Science Research Day, Athens, GA, USA.

Presentation
Tomasz Oliwa, "Machine Learning techniques utilized for Prediction and Classification on the Alzheimer's
Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset", presented at the Graduate Student Conference, Athens, GA, USA.

2008

Presentation
Tomasz Oliwa, "Introducing Structures for Music Composition with Probabilistic Finite-State Machines", presented at the
8th Annual Georgia Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Conference (GGSIC 2008), Athens, GA, USA.

2006

Presentation
Tomasz Oliwa, "Understand the Java Memory Model", presented at the 5th KeY Symposium 2006, Speyer, Germany.


Selected Projects

Natural language processing (NLP)
Stanford CoreNLP Extensions at https://github.com/toliwa/CoreNLP-jMWE
This Stanford CoreNLP annotator is able to capture Multi-Word Expressions (MWE) / collocations from plain text. Under the hood, it integrates jMWE, which itself employs a database generated through processing WordNet.

Applications of information retrieval from clinical texts.

Machine Learning
I am interested in developing and applying machine learning techniques in various domains:

Applications of named-entity recognition, document and sentence level classification, deep learning and topic modeling on clinical texts.

• Music composition based on inductive learning with time-delay neural networks, you can get an overview by looking at this poster.

• Multi-agent predator-prey simulators with feed-forward neural network trained agents.

• Multi-model based predictors of Alzheimer's disease based on medical data sets.

Evolutionary Computation

• Evolutionary creativity in the domain of music composition.

Formal Methods, Verification
At the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany I was a graduate research assistant in the KeY Project, a formal methods
tool for specification and verification of object oriented software.

Virtual/Simulated GNU/Linux Networks
During my project internship at the University of Koblenz, Germany I worked on an implementation of NIS and NFS
in Virtual Network User Mode Linux (VNUML).


Teaching

I have held guest lectures in the following courses:

Fall 2013

CSCI/ARTI 8950 Machine Learning

Spring 2013

CSCI/ARTI 8950 Machine Learning

Fall 2012

CSCI 4560/6560 Evolutionary Computation

Fall 2011

CSCI 4560/6560 Evolutionary Computation


Reviews


• Reviewer, American Medical Informatics Association 2020 Virtual Annual Symposium (AMIA 2020 Virtual Annual Symposium)
• Reviewer, American Medical Informatics Association 2018 Annual Symposium (AMIA 2018 Annual Symposium)
• Reviewer, Evolutionary Constrained Optimization, R. Datta and K. Deb (eds.), Springer, 2015
• Program committee, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2018 (GECCO 2018)
• Program committee, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2017 (GECCO 2017)
• Program committee, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2016 (GECCO 2016)

• Program committee, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2015 (GECCO 2015)
• Program committee, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2014 (GECCO 2014)
• Program committee, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2012 (GECCO 2012)

• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2020 (CEC 2020)
• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2019 (CEC 2019)
• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2018 (CEC 2018)
• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2017 (CEC 2017)
• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2016 (CEC 2016)
• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2014 (CEC 2014)
• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2013 (CEC 2013)
• Reviewer, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2012 (CEC 2012)
• Reviewer, IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence 2013 (SSCI 2013)


Interests outside of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence

Electric Guitar
Download one of my songs/recordings here. This hard rock instrumental was recorded under GNU/Linux with audacity
for the guitar recording and hydrogen for the drums. To listen to it, you will need the Ogg Vorbis sound lib (Open source).

Tae Kwon Do
I used to workout Tae Kwon Do sport at the University of Georgia.

Literature
I enjoy reading some 19th-century German literature and philosophy.
I also like novels written by Stanislaw Lem and Franz Kafka, and comparatively modern experimental works such as "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski.