SimulaMets research projects are both internally and externally financed. We collaborate with universities both in Norway and in other countries, as well as with industry.
UPSKILL
An incomplete mapping of the skills of a given individual, combined with insufficient insight into a company's actual need for competence, give rise to quite a few challenges. For instance, it may lead to hiring the wrong candidates, lack of insight into the best path for personal development and challenges when deciding relevant content for courses, learning material and for continued education.
UPSKILL will introduce a global platform for professional networking. The platform will connect individuals, companies and learning providers, and offer automatic methods for identification, mapping, and development of skills and abilities.
The project will result in new methods for representing the skills of an individual, mapping a company's need for competence, as well as new methods for matching available skills and abilities with the actual need for
competence. The methods will be self-learning, applicable for commercial use and independent of industry.
As a result, the UPSKILL platform will lead to simplified and less expensive hiring and restructuring processes, reduced risk of hiring wrong candidates, free competence guidance for individuals, and content recommendation for learning providers. The platform will be launched in Europe and Southeast Asia after project completion.
Simula’s Role
Simula plays a central role in designing and developing data-driven algorithms for the automatic and unbiased hiring process, identification of individual’s competence profile from available data sources, and development of matching algorithms for potential employees and employers. The developed methods will form a solid foundation for the UPSKILL platform.
Funding source
Research Council of Norway, BIA
All partners
Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering
Oslo Metropolitan University
University of South-Eastern Norway
Coordinator
Conexus AS
DeCipher
Cancer is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In Norway alone, there are more than 33,000 new cancer patients each year, and 11,000 cancer-associated deaths in 2017. A large proportion of these incidents are preventable. For example, a mass-screening program against cervical cancer established in the Nordic countries has demonstrated a reduction in morbidity and mortality almost by 80 %. Despite this success, it remains a significant challenge to improve the screening program, such as minimize over screening and undertreatment and hence reduce expenditure in a broad public health perspective.
Current knowledge about the disease, together with a wealth of available data and modern technologies, can offer far better-personalized prevention, by deriving an individual-based time till the next screening. Existing automatic decision support systems for cervical cancer prevention are, however, extremely conservative as they are mostly limited to identifying patients who are overdue for their next routine screening, without providing any personalized recommendations for follow-ups.
By intelligent use of existing registries and health data, DeCipher aims to develop a data-driven framework to provide a personalized time-varying risk assessment for cancer initiation and identify subgroups of individuals and factors leading to similar disease progression. By unveiling structure hidden in the data, we will develop novel theoretically grounded machine learning methods for the analysis of large-scale registry and health data.
DeCipher consists of an excellent multidisciplinary research team from diverse fields such as machine learning, data mining, screening programs, and epidemiology. Available to screening programs, clinicians, and individuals in the population, the DeCipher results will allow for an improvement of an individual’s preventive cancer healthcare while reducing the cost of screening programs.
SimulaMet’s Role
SimulaMet will play a central role in the development of machine learning algorithms for longitudinal screening data analysis. Moreover, as the coordinator, SimulaMet is responsible for overall project management and dissemination activities.
Funding source
Research Council of Norway, IKTPLUSS
All partners
Cancer Registry Norway
Karolinska University Hospital, Sweden
Lawrence Livermore National Lab, USA
Coordinator
SimulaMet
TrACEr: Time-Aware ConstrainEd Multimodal Data Fusion
Data mining holds the promise to improve our understanding of dynamics of complex systems such as the human brain and human metabolome (i.e., the complete set of small biochemical compounds in the human body) by discovering the underlying patterns, i.e., subsystems, in data collected from these systems. However, discovering those patterns and understanding their evolution in time is a challenging task. The complexity of the systems requires collection of both time-evolving and static data from multiple sources using different technologies recording the behavior of the system from complementary viewpoints, and there is a lack of data mining methods that can find the hidden patterns in such complex data.
The goal of this multidisciplinary project is to develop novel data mining techniques to jointly analyze static and dynamic data sets to discover underlying patterns, understand temporal dynamics of those patterns, and capture early signs of future outcomes. We will introduce a scalable and constrained data fusion framework that can jointly factorize heterogeneous data in the form of matrices and multi-way arrays, by incorporating temporal as well as domain-specific constraints.
These methods will be motivated by a real, challenging system: the human metabolome, and used to jointly analyze static genetic information and longitudinal metabolomics data to discover interpretable patterns, i.e., subsystems corresponding to metabolic networks (networks of metabolites acting together), with the ultimate goal of understanding their role in the transition from healthy to diseased states. The project will play a significant role in terms of developing the data mining tools needed to extract meaningful information from the surge of data, referred to as "personal data clouds" being collected in predictive medicine studies, where participants give blood samples regularly to track their health status and will be alerted of early signs of diseases.
Funding Source
Research Council of Norway, IKTPLUSS (2020-2023)
Novo Nordisk Foundation, Exploratory Interdisciplinary Synergy Grant (2020-2022)
Partners
COPSAC (Danish Pediatric Asthma Center)
University of Copenhagen
University of Amsterdam