BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.2.3.1//EN TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:VEVENT UID:290@escience.washington.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251021T163000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20251021T172000 DTSTAMP:20251016T214125Z URL:https://escience.washington.edu/events/uw-data-science-seminar-neel-gu pta-and-shirin-khanam/ SUMMARY:UW Data Science Seminar: Neel Gupta and Shirin Khanam DESCRIPTION:Please join us for a UW Data Science Seminar featuring Neel Gup ta and Shirin Khanam on Tuesday\, October 21st from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PT. The seminar will be held in IEB G109.\n\n \;\n\n"Using the TikTok Rese arch API to Investigate the BookTok Phenomenon"\nAbstract: “BookTok\, ” a large bookish subcommunity on TikTok\, has emerged as a surprisingly influential force in the field of contemporary literature over the last s everal years. When books are discussed on TikTok\, their sales often skyro cket. Our research leverages the messy and often inconsistent TikTok Resea rch API to characterize the growth of the BookTok community from 2020-2024 . We also identify major genres\, authors\, and books that have gained par ticular prominence on the platform and have remained large reference point s for the community. Both our data collection and analysis is in progress\ , and we welcome suggestions for further analysis.\n\n \;\n\nBiography : Neel Gupta is a PhD student in the iSchool at UW working in the fields o f cultural analytics and digital humanities. He received his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in English and Mathematics. He's intereste d in how economic\, sociological\, and technological changes in society ha ve affected the cultural outputs of society\, specifically in the realm of 20th and 21st century fiction. Neel is more broadly interested in how dig ital and computational methods can be used alongside humanistic methodolog ies to study culture. His recent research on Seattle Public Library Data h as been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Open Humanities Data and the Computational Humanities Research Conference.\n\n \;\n"A web- based LumpIt"\n\nAbstract: Rare genetic disorders affect 263-446 million p ersons or ~3.5–5.9% of the worldwide population\, and the vast majority of these persons have a Mendelian condition (MC). Over 4\,500 genes underl ie one or more of the 6\,000 MCs described to date\, and ~25% of these gen es underlie two or more MCs. However\, there is actually no quantitative m ethod for distinguishing between MCs due to variants in the same gene. Ins tead\, researchers and clinicians define Mendelian conditions manually and subjectively based on an arbitrary selection of perceived shared clinical features. Conditions can be retroactively merged or separated through a p rocess called “lumping and splitting.” This means we have no idea how many different rare diseases really exist. More importantly\, the lack of objective approaches for determining when two claimed disease entities are sufficiently distinct to constitute two separate diseases limits the accu racy of information (e.g.\, natural history\, anticipatory guidance\, etc. ) that clinicians provide to families with a likely pathogenic or pathogen ic variant in one of these genes. We developed a machine learning tool\, LumpIt\, that can predict expert lumping and splitting decisions. Adoption of LumpIt by clinicians and researchers in rare disease will improve the precision of clinical diagnosis with MCs and accelerate discovery and deli neation of new MCs.\n\n \;\n\nBiography: Dr. Shirin Khanam is a Resear ch Scientist 3 in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washin gton. Her research focuses on identifying gene–disease associations in r are diseases by utilizing AI models\, natural language processing\, cloud computing\, and high-performance computing to enhance biomedical discovery .\n\n \;\n\nThe 2025-2026 seminars will be held in person\, and are fr ee and open to the public.\n ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://escience.washington.edu/wp-content/uploa ds/2025/10/Seminar921.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20250309T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR