Interests
A/Prof Hanna Suominen, MSc, PhD, Docent, MEdL, SFHEA (Australian National University, ANU) is at the forefront of accelerating health impact through Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Research
Hanna has almost 20 years’ experience and world-class excellence of working at the interface between technology, health sciences, and education. She has discovered methods to detect Parkinsonian biomarkers based ML on human voice that are imperceptible to a neurologist; developed search engines and smart sports-sensors used by the Turku University Hospital and Australian Institute of Sports; co-invented the smart PostAc® job search-engine; and co-chaired the 2012-2021 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum eHealth lab. Her work has been published in nearly 150 papers with over 2,200 citations; received ML/NLP-method, research, teaching, and business awards; and won competitive funding of over $25 million in 2016-2021 alone. She is passionate about co-producing ML and NLP research, translating it into real-life impact as real products with Burning Glass Technologies and Konan Medical, among others, and concurrently educating a generation of workforce empowered by these technologies.
Biography
A/Prof Hanna Suominen is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, the Associate Director (Engagement & Impact) of the ANU School of Computing, and Big Data Program Leader of Our Health in Our Hands (OHIOH), the inaugural ANU Grand Challenge Program. She previously worked for Data61 of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) as the Team Leader of the Theory and Applications in Multimodal Pattern Analysis (TAMPA) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), respectively. Her MSc (Applied Math, 2005), PhD (Computer Science (CS), 2009), and Docent (a.k.a. adjunct professor, CS, 2013) were obtained from the University of Turku, Finland, followed by her Senior Fellowship of Higher Education Association (2019) from the ANU and MEdL (Curriculum & Pedagogy, 2020) from Monash University.
Activities & Awards
Since 2006, Hanna has received 13 prizes/awards for academic and research excellence and in recognition of my career progression, including being 1 out of 16 selected Australia–China Young Scientists (1 out of 2 in CS) in 2018; scoring Prof Jan EW Beneken Prize for the best abstract and presentation in the 2019 Conference on Applied Modeling in Acute Care (2019), the Top Price in both the 2017 and 2019 OnPrime Programs for Startups, and ANU Teaching Award for the Document Analysis course in 2012; and winning ML/NLP method prizes in the 2011 TREC Medical Records Track (within the top 6 out of 12) by the Text Retrieval Conference and the 2007 Computational Medicine Center’s Medical NLP Challenge (3rd out of 44), among others. These highlights build on Hanna’s other successes, such as her docent sample lecture, titled “C-value method for summarising key content” that got awarded the highest grade by the assessing staff and students and PhD thesis on clinical ML and NLP approved with honours; this grading is granted internationally in the top 10% of the field.