NLP Programmer

Position Title: Natural Language Processing Research Programmer (Job ID: 350909)

Department of Surgery (DOS, https://med.umn.edu/surgery) at the University of Minnesota is seeking Masters or Ph.D. level programmer to join a team working on multiple research projects in the field health data science, artificial intelligence and biomedical informatics in the Division of Health Data Science (HDS) at the DOS. The position is an annually renewable professional academic appointment.

About the Program

Division of Health Data Science is a newly created division which focuses on development of novel data science methods to analyze biomedical big data for advancing health care. The Natural Language Processing / Information Extraction (NLP/IE) Program (https://healthinformatics.umn.edu/natural-language-processing) is a team of investigators, postdoctoral researchers, programmers, and students who work together on NLP for a variety of clinical and biomedical tasks.

Duties/Responsibilities:

  • Regularly conduct computational experiments to execute algorithms on various health and biomedical informatics projects
  • Assist with new project development including literature review, study design.
  • Work under general supervision but usually is given the latitude to make decision on projects that s/he is accountable for delivering on; decisions may involve an approach from among alternatives, determining how to best use available resources
  • Implement NLP algorithms, summarize findings and generate study results for research topics
  • Write, edit or critique technical reports and/or publications describing research results to sponsors or funders of the research; Proof text, tables, and data analysis files for software, code and experiments
  • Communicate and present analytical results to researchers, faculty, and other academic professionals in associated fields of expertise (spoken presentations, poster or written work summaries for display, panels, and other formats).

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

  • M.S. in Computer Science, Informatics, Computational linguistics, Statistics, or related technical disciplines
  • Understanding of algorithms, data-structures and software engineering principles
  • Strong programming skills in Python/Perl or Java. Knowledge of C/C++, SQL. The successful candidate must be able to demonstrate these skills with sample code written in these languages
  • Understanding of key natural language processing, data mining, machine learning and statistical methods
  • Experience working independently in a rapid changing scientific environment


Preferred Qualifications:

  • Research experience in natural language processing, text mining in electronic health records, biomedical literature and/or social media data
  • Knowledge of medical terminologies and ontologies (e.g., UMLS, SNOMED-CT, ICD)
  • Expertise in Machine Learning, Neural Networks and Deep learning for NLP tasks
  • Experience in publishing and presenting scientific papers in conferences/journals
  • Ability to work collaboratively with a diverse group of research scientists with different skill sets and expertise