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Annual Symposium Student Paper Competition

The AMIA Student Paper Competition is held annually at the AMIA Annual Symposium. Student papers are selected by the Scientific Program Committee and forwarded to the Student Paper Advisory Committee (SPAC) which nominates eight finalist papers for presentation during the meeting. Based on a combination of the quality of the written paper and the subsequent clarity of the oral presentation, the judges select first, second, and third place award winners in recognition of the best student papers. The 1st Place paper is known as the Martin Epstein Award.

The judging of student paper presentations is held at a special session, normally just in advance of the opening session at the AMIA Symposium. Each year the session features a collection of the very best research presented at the meeting. The student paper competition is supported by the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

Past Winners

2021

Martin Epstein Award First Place

Chart Completion Time of Attending Physicians While Using Medical Scribes

  • Sarah Florig, Oregon Health & Science University, Department of Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology
Second Place

NetworkSIR and EnvironmentalSIR: Effective, Open-Source Epidemic Modeling in the Absence of Data

  • Madison Pickering, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, The University of Texas at Dallas
Third Place

State of the Art Causal Inference in the Presence of Extraneous Covariates: A Simulation Study

  • Raluca Cobzaru, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2020

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Do Traditional BMI Categories Capture Future Obesity? A Comparison with Trajectories of BMI and Incidence of Cancer, C. Watson, University of Manchester, Manchester Cancer Research Centre, NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre; N. Geifman, University of Manchester
  • 2nd Place: Characterizing Database Granularity Using SNOMED-CT Hierarchy, A. Ostropolets, Columbia University; C. Reich, IQVIA; P. Ryan, Epidemiology Analytics, Janssen Research & Development; C. Weng, Columbia University; A. Molinaro, F. DeFalco, Epidemiology Analytics, Janssen Research & Development; J. Jonnagaddala, S. Liaw, University of New South Wales Sydney; H. Jeon, R. Park, Ajou University Graduate School of Medicine; M. Spotnitz, K. Natarajan, Columbia University; K. Kostka, G. Argyriou, IQVIA; R. Miller, A. Williams, Tufts Medical Center, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies; E. Minty, University of Calgary; J. Posada, Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research; G. Hripcsak, Columbia University, New York-Presbyterian Hospital
  • 3rd Place: Mental Health Comorbidity Analysis in Pediatric Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder Using Rhode Island Medical Claims Data, K. Brown, Brown University; I. Sarkar, Brown University, Rhode Island Quality Institute; E. Chen, Brown University

2019

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Comparison of Prediction Model Performance Updating Protocols: Using a Data-driven Testing Procedure to Guide Updating, Sharon E. Davis, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine; Robert A. Greevy, Vanderbilt University; Thomas A. Lasko, Colin Walsh, Michael Matheny, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
  • 2nd Place: Assessing the Validity of a a priori Patient-trial Generalizability Score Using Real-world Data from a Large Clinical Data Research Network: A Colorectal Cancer Clinical Trial Case Study, Qian Li, University of Florida; Zhe He, Florida State University; Yi Guo, Hansi Zhang, Thomas J. George, William Hogan, University of Florida; Neil Charness, Florida State University; Jiang Bian, University of Florida
  • 3rd Place: An Interprofessional Approach to Workflow Evaluation Focused on the Electronic Health Record Using Time Motion Study Methods, Jessica Schwartz, Jonathan Elias, Cody Slater, Kenrick Cato, Sarah Collins Rossetti, Columbia University

2018

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): When an Alert is Not an Alert: A Pilot Study to Characterize Behavior and Cognition Associated with Medication Alerts, T. Reese, K. Kawamoto, G. Del Fiol, F. Drews, T. Taft, H. Kramer, C. Weir, University of Utah
  • 2nd Place: Low Screening Rates for Diabetes Mellitus Among Family Members of Affected Relatives, F. Polubriaginof, N. Shang, G. Hripcsak, N. Tatonetti, Columbia University; D. Vawdrey, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University
  • 3rd Place: Incorporating Knowledge-Driven Insights into a Collaborative Filtering Model to Facilitate the Differential Diagnosis of Rare Diseases, F. Shen, H. Liu, Mayo Clinic

2017

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Classifying Acute Ischemic Stroke Onset Time Using Deep Imaging Features, King Chung Ho, William Speier, Suzie M. El-Saden, Corey W. Arnold
  • 2nd Place: Formative Evaluation of CareNexus: a Tool for the Visualization and Management of Care Teams of Complex Pediatric Patients, Pallavi RanadeKharkar, Chuck Norlin, Guilherme Del Fiol
  • 3rd Place: Routine Self-tracking of Health: Reasons, Facilitating Factors, and the Potential Impact on Health Management Practices, Mayara Costa Figueiredo, Clara Caldeira, Yunan Chen, Kai Zheng

2016

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Content and Quality of Free-text Occupation Documentation in the Electronic Health Record, R. Aldekhyyel, University of Minnesota; E.Chen, Brown University; S. Rajamani, Y. Wang, G. Melton, University of Minnesota
  • 2nd Place: SMASH: A Data-driven Informatics Method to Assist Experts in Characterizing Semantic Heterogeneity Among Data Elements, W. Brown, C. Weng, Columbia University; D. Vawdrey, New York-Presbyterian Hospital Value Insitute; A. Carballo-Diéguez, HIV Center for Clinical Behavioral Studies; S. Bakken, Columbia University
  • 3rd Place: Plexlines: Tracking Socio-communicative Behaviors Using Timeline Visualizations, J. Lee, H. Kong, K. Karahalios, S. Lin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2015

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Development and Preliminary Evaluation of a Prototype of a Learning Electronic Medical Record System, A. King, G. Cooper, H. Hochheiser, G. Clermont, S. Visweswaran, University of Pittsburgh
  • 2nd Place: Modeling Risk of Cardio-respiratory Instability as a Heterogeneous Process, L. Chen, A. Dubrawski, Carnegie Mellon University; M. Hravnak, G. Clermont, M. Pinsky, University of Pittsburgh
  • 3rd Place: Desiderata for Major Eligibility Criteria in Breast Cancer Clinical Trials, M. Paulson, C. Weng, Columbia University

2014

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): A Novel Method to Assess Incompleteness of Mammography Report Content, Francisco Gimenez, Stanford University; Yirong Wu, Elizabeth S. Burnside, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Daniel Rubin, Stanford University
  • 2nd Place: MedMinify: An Advice-giving System for Simplifying the Schedules of Daily Home Medication Regimens Used to Treat Chronic Conditions, Allen Flynn, University of Michigan
  • Third Place: Could Patient Self-reported Health Data Complement EHR for Phenotyping?, Daniel Fort, Columbia University; Adam Wilcox, Intermountain Healthcare; Chunhua Weng, Columbia University

2013

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Crowdsourcing the Verification of Relationships in Biomedical Ontologies, J. Mortensen, M. Musen, N. Noy, Stanford University
  • 2nd Place: Inferring the Semantic Relationships of Words within an Ontology Using Random Indexing: Applications to Pharmacogenomics, B. Percha, R. Altman, Stanford University
  • Third Place: Semantic Annotation of Clinical Events for Generating a Problem List, D. Mowery, P. Jordan, J. Wiebe, H. Harkema, University of Pittsburgh; W. Chapman, University of California San Diego

2012

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Prognostic Physiology: Modeling Patient Severity in Intensive Care Units Using Radial Domain Folding, Rohit Joshi and Peter Szolovits; Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 2nd Place: Phenome-Based Analysis as a Means for Discovering Context-Dependent Clinical Reference Ranges, Jeremy L Warner and Gil Alterovitz; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and Center for Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
  • Third Place: A Qualitative Analysis of EHR Clinical Document Synthesis by Clinicians, Oladimeji Farri, David S Pieckiewicz, Ahmed S Rahman, Terrence J Adam, Serguei V Pakhomov, and Genevieve B Melton; Institute for Health Informatics, College of Pharmacy, and Department of Surgery

2011

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Evaluating Effectiveness of Clinical Alerts: a Signal Detection Approach, M. Ong and E. Coiera, University of New South Wales
  • 2nd Place: Exploring Schizophrenia Drug-gene Interactions through Molecular Network and Pathway Modeling, D. Putnam, J. Sun, and Z. Zhao, Vanderbilt University
  • Third Place: Naïve Electronic Health Record-based Phenotype Identification for Rheumatoid Arthritis, R. Carroll, A. Eyler, and J. Denny, Vanderbilt University

2010

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Private Medical Record Linkage with Approximate Matching, E. Durham, Y. Xue; M. Kantarcioglu; B. Malin, Vanderbilt University
  • 2nd Place: A Method to Compute Treatment Suggestions from Local Order Entry Data, J. Klann, Regenstrief Institute; J. Klann, Indiana University; G. Schadow, S. Downs, Regenstrief Institute
  • Third Place: Disseminating Maternal Health Information to Rural Women: A User-Centered Design Framework, V. Parmar, Delft University of Technology

2009

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Visualized Data Speeds Review of Potential Adverse Drug Events in Patients on Multiple Medications, Jon Duke, Regenstrief Institute
  • 2nd Place: A Network-theoretic Approach for Translation across Open Biological Ontologies, Chintan Patel, Columbia University
  • Third Place: Exploring Variation in User Adoption of Personalized Risk Calculator Estimates, Christopher Harle, University of Florida

2008

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Using Computerized Provider Order Entry and Clinical Decision Support to Improve Primary-Care Physician Implementation of Consultants Medical Recommendations, Martin Were, Regenstrief Institute
  • 2nd Place: Using Natural Language Processing to Improve Accuracy of Automated Notifiable Disease Reporting, Jeff Friedlin, Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School
  • Third Place: Somatic Mutation Signatures of Cancer, Stephen Piccolo, University of Utah

2007 (tie for second place, no third place)

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): SANDS: An Architecture for Clinical Decision Support in a National Health Information Network, Adam Wright, Oregon Health & Science University
  • 2nd Place: Signout: A Collaborative Document with Implications for the Future of Clinical Information Systems, Daniel Stein, Columbia University
  • 2nd Place: Use of Classification Models Based on Usage Data for the Selection of Infobutton Resources, Guilherme Del Fiol, University of Utah

2006

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Discovering Biological Guilds through Topological Abstraction, Gil Alterovitz and Marco F. Ramoni, MIT/Harvard, Cambridge, MA
  • 2nd Place: Automated Development of Order Sets and Corollary Orders by Data Mining in an Ambulatory Computerized Physician Order Entry System, Adam Wright and Dean F. Sittig, Oregon Health & Science University, Northwest Permanente Medical Group, Portland OR
  • Third Place: Task Analysis of Writing Hospital Admission Orders: Evidence of a Problem-Based Approach, Christopher Johnson and Roni F. Zeiger, Stanford Medical Informatics, Palo Alto, CA

2005

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Design, Implementation, Use, and Preliminary Evaluation of SEBASTIAN, a Standards-based Web Service for Clinical Decision Support, Kensaku Kawamoto and David F. Lobach, Duke University, Durham, NC
  • 2nd Place: Using Bayesian Networks to Predict Survival of Liver Transplant Patients, Nathan Hoot and Dominik Aronsky, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN
  • Third Place: Patient-specific Models for Predicting the Outcomes of Patients With Community Acquired Pneumonia, Shyam Visweswaran and Gregory F. Cooper, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

2003

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Text Categorization Models for Retrieval of High Quality Articles in Internal Medicine, Y. Aphinyanaphongs, and C.F. Aliferis, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
  • 2nd Place: The Cognitive Complexity of a Provider Order Entry Interface, J. Horsky, D.R. Kaufman, and V.L. Patel, Columbia University, New York, NY
  • Third Place: IndexFinder: A Method of Extracting Key Concepts from Clinical Texts for Indexing, Q. Zou, W.W. Chu, C. Morioka, G.H. Leazer, H. Kangarloo, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

2002

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Analysis of Identifier Performance Using a Deterministic Linkage Algorithm, S.J. Grannis, MD, J.M. Overhage, MD, PhD, and C.J. McDonald, MD, Regenstrief Institute for Health Care, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN
  • 2nd Place: Free-text Medical Document Retrieval Via Phrase-based Vector Space Model: W. Mao, MS, and W.W. Chu, PhD, Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
  • Third Place: Generating a Mortality Model From a Pediatric ICU (PICU) Database Utilizing Knowledge Discovery, C.E. Kennedy, MD, and N. Aoki, MD, PhD, MS, Department of Pediatrics, Critical Care Section, and Department of Information Technology, Baylor College of Medicine, and The University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, TX

2001

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Building ICU Artifact Detection Models with More Date in Less Time, Christine L. Tsien, PhD
  • 2nd Place: Comparing Syntactic Complexity in Medical and non-Medical Corpora, David A. Cambell, MPhil
  • Third Place: A Knowledge Model for the Interpretation and Visualization of NLP-parsed Discharged Summaries, Michael Krauthammer, MD

1999

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Wendy W. Chapman, Department of Medical Informatics, University of Utah and LDS Hospital, Salt Lake City, UT
  • 2nd Place: Stephen Porter, MD, MPH, Division of Emergency Medicine, Children's Hospital, Boston, MA
  • Third Place: Denise M. Goldsmith, MS, RN, Center for Clinical Computing, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA

1998

  • 1st Place (Martin Epstein Award): Data Mining by Clinicians, Daniel J. Nigrin
  • 2nd Place: Using the Extensible Markup Lanaguage (XML) in Automated Clinical Practice Guidelines, Anil K. Dubey
  • Third Place: Vector-field Classification in Magnetic-resonance Angiography, Maria A. Tovar

1997

  • John D. Halamka, M.D. -- Halamka JD, Safran C. Virtual consolidation of Boston's Beth Israel and New England Deaconess Hospitals via the World Wide Web. Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp. 1997;:349-53.

1996

  • Justin B. Starren, M.D., Ph.D. -- Starren J, Johnson SM.Notations for high efficiency data presentation in mammography. Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp. 1996;:557-61.

1995

  • Michael M. Wagner, M.D., Ph.D. -- Wagner MM, Cooper GF. Evaluation of a belief-network-based reminder system that learns from utility feedback. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1995;:666-72.

1994

  • Lucila Ohno-Machado, M.D., Ph.D. -- Ohno-Machado L. Identification of low frequency patterns in backpropagation neural networks. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1994;:853-9.

1993

  • Henri J. Suermondt -- Suermondt, H.J., Cooper, G.F. An evaluation of explanations of probabilistic inference, In: Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (1992) 579-585.

1992

  • Thomas D. Wu -- Wu TD. A problem decomposition method for efficient diagnosis and interpretation of multiple disorders. Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 1991 Aug;35(4):239-50.

1991

1990

  • R. Martin Chavez -- Chavez, R.M., Cooper, G.F. Hypermedia and randomized algorithms for medical expert systems, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine 32 (1990) 5-16.

1987

  • Dean F. Sittig, Ph.D. -- Sittig DF, Gardner RM, Pace NL, Morris AH, Beck E. Computerized management of patient care in a complex, controlled clinical trial in the intensive care unit. Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 1989 Oct-Nov;30(2-3):77-84.

1986

  • Glenn Rennels - A Computational Model of Reasoning from the Clinical Literature. Information about the competition: http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC2244979/pdf/procascamc00020-0370.pdf ; copy of the paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2244950/pdf/procascamc00020-0372.pdf

1985

  • Gregory F. Cooper -- Cooper, G.F. A diagnostic method that uses causal knowledge and linear programming in the application of Bayes' formula, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine 22 (1986) 223-237.

1984

  • Atam P. Dhawan, Ph.D. -- Dhawan AP. Early detection of cutaneous malignant melanoma by three-dimensional nevoscopy. Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 1985 Oct;21(1):59-68.

1983

  • David J. Brailer, M.D., Ph.D. http://www.amia.org/about-amia/leadership/acmi-fellow/david-j-brailer-md-phd-facmi

1982

  • Tom D. East

1981

  • Nitish V. Thakor -- Thakor NV, Webster JG, Tompkins WJ. Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a microprocessor-based portable arrhythmia monitor. Med Biol Eng Comput 1984 Mar; 22(2) :151-9. http://folio.jhu.edu/faculty/Nitish%20V._Thakor

The Informatics Summit Student Paper

The Informatics Summit Student Paper Award recognizes outstanding scholarly contributions in the domains of translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, data science and informatics implementation. The award is given to a paper that contributes to the state of informatics knowledge and practice, is novel and impactful, and is represented by the highest overall quality of the paper selected by the TBI and CRI Scientific Program Committees.

Past Winners

2024

FERI: A Multitask-based Fairness Achieving Algorithm with Applications to Fair Organ Transplantation
Can Li, Dejian Lai, Xiaoqian Jiang, Kai Zhang, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas

2021

Understanding Clinical Trial Reports: Extracting Medical Entities and Their Relations
Benjamin Nye, Jay DeYoung, Eric Lehman, Northeastern University; Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania; Iain Marshall, King’s College London; Byron Wallace, Northeastern University

2020

A Series Registration Framework to Recover Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Data Degraded by Motion
Jenna M. Schabdach, University of Pittsburgh; Rafael Ceschin, University of Pittsburgh/UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh; Vince Lee, Vincent Schmithorst, University of Pittsburgh; Ashok Panigrahy, University of Pittsburgh/UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh

2019

Facilitating Inclusion of Geocoded Pollution Data into Health Studies
Rebecca Greenblatt, Blanca E. Himes, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

2018

TBI: A Low Rank Model for Phenotype Imputation in Autism Spectrum Disorder Kelly Paskov, Dennis Wall, Stanford University
CRI: A Novel Representation of Vaccine Efficacy Trial Datasets for Use in Computer Simulation of Vaccination Policy
Mohammadin Tajgardoon, Michael Wagner, Shyam Visweswaran, Richard Zimmerman, University of Pittsburgh

2017

CRI: Eye-tracking for clinical decision support: A method to capture automatically what physicians are viewing in the EMR
Andrew J King, Harry Hochheiser, Shyam Visweswaran, Gilles Clermont, Gregory F Cooper. University of Pittsburgh

2016

TBI: PALME: PAtients Like My gEnome
Lichang Wang, Yong Fang, Northwest A&F University, Shaanxi, China; Dima Afef, New Jersey Institute of Technology Suyash Rathi, Syracuse University; Li Shen, Donghua University; Xiaoqian Jiang and Shuang Wang, University of California-San Diego
CRI: Tumor information extraction in radiology reports for hepatocellular carcinoma patients
Wen-wai Yim; Tyler Denman; Sharon W. Kwan; Meliha Yetisgen; University of Washington

2015

TBI: Are All Vaccines Created Equal? Using Electronic Health Records to Discover Vaccines Associated With Clinician-Coded Adverse Events
Mary Regina Boland and Nicholas Tatonetti, Columbia University
CRI: Phenotyping Adverse Drug Reactions: Statin-Related Myotoxicity
Laura K. Wiley; Jeremy Moretz; Joshua C. Denny; Josh F. Peterson; William S. Bush, Vanderbilt University