Muhammad (Tuan) Amith joined SBMI in September 2019 after earning his PhD in Biomedical Informatics from University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He holds bachelors and masters in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Houston. Previously, he was a predoctoral research fellow with the UTHealth Innovation in Cancer Prevention Research for the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas. Before graduate school, he worked over a decade as an engineer at several start-ups in various industries.

His research straddles between health consumer ontology-based AI and human computer interaction. It encompasses areas such as natural language processing/machine learning, public health, mHealth, network analysis, affective computing, and intelligent agent architectures. His dissertation focused on the application of ontology-based technologies for automating speech counseling of HPV vaccine and impacting health beliefs toward the vaccine. One of his current research activities involves semantic network approaches in examining vaccine adverse events in clinical notes. Concurrently, he continues to explore the domain of applied health consumer ontologies for intelligent agents and tools for physical environments. His endeavors have included collaboration with clinicians, public health researchers, and researchers from other disciplines.

Tuan is a member of Association of Computing and Machinery (ACM) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and has served as a reviewer for journals and conferences on medical informatics and semantic web. He has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers and has received a best of mHealth distinction for the 2012 AMIA Annual Symposium for a conference paper.

"There is an interest in fusing statistical-based AI (i.e. machine learning) with symbolic-based AI, like ontologies. My research focused on the latter, so it will be exciting what new opportunities this will bring for AI in health care research".

Education

• PhD, Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center, 2019
• MS, Software Engineering, University of Houston-Clear Lake, 2010
• BS, Computer Science-Science Concentration, University of Houston (Victoria), 2003

Areas of Expertise

• consumer health ontologies
• natural language processing
• public health informatics
• network analysis
• mHealth

Selected Recent Publications:

1. Muhammad Amith, Rebecca Lin, Rachel Cunningham, Qiwei Luna Wu, Lara S. Savas, Yang Gong, Julie A. Boom, Lu Tang, Cui Tao. 2020. “Examining Potential Usability and Health Beliefs Among Young Adults Using a Conversational Agent for HPV Vaccine Counseling.” AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science proceedings. AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science, 2020, 43–52. PMCID: PMC7233050. Informatics Implementation Best Paper Award.
2. Muhammad Amith, Kirk Roberts, Cui Tao. 2019. “Conceiving an application ontology to model patient human papillomavirus vaccine counseling for dialogue management.” BMC Bioinformatics 20, 706. PMCID: PMC6927108. doi:10.1186/s12859-019-3193-7
3. Muhammad Amith, Rebecca Lin, Licong Cui, Dennis Wang, Anna Zhu, Grace Xiong, Hua Xu, Kirk Roberts and Cui Tao. 2019. "An Ontology-Powered Dialogue Engine For Patient Communication of Vaccines." Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantics-Powered Data Mining and Analytics co-located with the 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019) 2427.
4. Muhammad Amith, Frank Manion, Chen Liang, Marcelline Harris, Dennis Wang, Yongqun He, Cui Tao. 2019. "Architecture and Usability of OntoKeeper, an Ontology Evaluation Tool." BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 19(Suppl 4), 152. PMCID: PMC6686219. doi:10.1186/s12911-019-0859-z
5. Muhammad Amith, Anna Zhu, Rachel Cunningham, Rebecca Lin, Lara Savas, Laura Shay, Julie Boom, Yong Chen, Yang Gong, Kirk Roberts, Cui Tao. 2019. "Early Usability Assessment of a Conversational Agent for HPV Vaccination." Studies in health technology and informatics, 257, pp.17-23. PMCID: PMC6677560. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-951-5-17
6. Muhammad Amith, Zhe He, Jiang Bian, Juan Antonio Lossio-Ventura, and Cui Tao. 2018. "Assessing the Gaps of the Evaluation for Biomedical Ontologies in Bio-Portal." Journal of Biomedical Informatics 80: 1-13. PMCID: PMC5882531. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2018.02.010