The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, currently has two visiting scholars in its community:  Yanpeng Li and Lihua Wei. 

Yanpeng Li comes to Drexel from Dalian University of Technology where he is a third year doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.  Yanpeng  will be a visiting scholar from October 2009 to October 2010.  His research interests involve semi-supervised machine learning, information extraction/retrieval and biomedical text mining.  His doctoral research theme is the development of a general framework that employs large amounts of unlabeled data to enrich the representation of sparse text data and the enhancement of the performance of biological information extraction, for example, named entity recognition, entity relation extraction and text categorization.  The main purpose of Yanpeng’s research project at Drexel is to integrate semantic and background knowledge to enhance the performance of BioIE (Biomedical Literature Information Extraction) and to investigate the common characteristics of semantic representation across different tasks.  Yanpeng will work with Dr. Xiaohua Tony Hu, iSchool Associate Professor, whose major research interests are data/Web mining, bioinformatics, information retrieval and rough sets.

Lihua Wei, has been a visiting scholar at the College since May 2009 and will be finishing up her work with Dr. Hu in November.  Lihua is a PhD candidate at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China where her studies were concentrated in the areas of pattern recognition, rough set theory and speaker identification.  Her research plan at Drexel has been to design a speech identification system based on rough set and fuzzy theory.  Speech identification as an important branch of speech recognition is considered one of the very challenging research topics in artificial intelligence.  Lihua planned to develop novel, efficient and effective methods based on a hybrid approach from Gaussian mixture model, support vector machine model and neural network models.

The iSchool at Drexel’s faculty welcomes international collaboration and the mutual benefits, including joint publications, which all the institutions involved gain from this experience.