Congratulations! FDI Lab’s Dr. I Burak Ozyurt Places 1st in 9th BioASQ Challenge (Task 9b)

Biomedical researchers are confronted with a problem: to bridge the gap between the vast amounts of biomedical knowledge and being able to access that highly specialized data. Thus, systems must “understand” the data to effectively integrate it and meet researchers’ needs. To counteract this, BioASQ is a project that challenges large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering (QA). The overarching goal is to generate software to build up to solve this issue in biomedical data management. Participants tested their knowledge and manipulation of text mining, information retrieval, natural language processing, and machine learning methods in real time to inevitably advance this computational infrastructure.

In this international challenge, comprising two portions, Dr. I Burak Ozyurt [UCSD (University of California San Diego) team] placed 1st in Task 9b: Biomedical Semantic QA PHASE B IDEAL BATCH 1-3, in addition to 1st and 2nd place on Task Synergy 9: Biomedical Semantic QA For COVID-19 in different rounds. This year, Dr. Ozyurt represented one of only three placing USA-based teams. In 2020 the BioASQ Challenge Task 8b, Dr. Ozyurt placed 2nd in three different batches for ideal answers!

Dr. Ozyurt is a part of the UCSD FAIR Data Informatics (FDI) Lab team, and an active contributor to the dkNET project as a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer.

dkNET and the FDI team applaud our own Dr. I Burak Ozyurt for not only placing first this year, but for his continued tenacity in the BioASQ Challenge!

Source and more information:

- BioASQ Challenge: http://bioasq.org/

- 9th BioASQ Winner: http://bioasq.org/participate/ninth-challenge-winners