Roland Roller

ABOUT MYSELF

I am a researcher and project manager in the Speech and Language Technology group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). I focus on topics related to natural language processing and machine learning with a high interest in the biomedical and clinical domain. Currently I am working within the research projects KEEPHA (Knowledge-enhanced information extraction across languages for pharmacovigilance), KIBATIN (AI-based assistance system for more reliable prioritization in the emergency department), ADBoard (Therapeutic Assistance and Decision Algorithms for Hepatobiliary Tumor Boards), PRIMA-AI (Prospectively investigating the impact of AI on shared decision making in post-kidney transplant care), smartNTx (Interactive AI-based decision-making competence for transplant medicine) and Medinym (AI-based anonymisation of personal patient data in clinical text and voice databases).

The last years, me and my collegues were developing resources and tools to process German medical text. We created various datasets and trained models for syntactic analysis and to extract relevant medical information from clinical text. Within the MACSS project we developed methods and models to cover the complete NLP pipeline to be able to process text of the nephrology domain. If possible we try to make our work (data and models) available for the community.
Currently I am focussing particularly on methods to support clinicians in their daily routine. In BigMedilytics we develop methods to detect high risk patients in context of kidney transplants. We work with longitudinal data including information such as demographics, vital parameter, lab values, medications (adherence) and clinical notes.

Besides, I have got a high interest in the generation, exploration and usage of knowledge graphs and biomedical ontologies to support NLP tasks, as well as the analysis of social media in context of health related topics.

Activities

2024Currently we organize a shared task at SMM4H: Cross-Lingual Few-Shot Relation Extraction for Pharmacovigilance.
October '23This semester, me and my colleagues give the seminar NLP4Health at TU Berlin.
August '23Short research visit of the Social Computing Lab at NAIST, Japan
May '23Our governance perspective for clinical decision support has been finally published: 'Klinische Entscheidungsfindung mit Künstlicher Intelligenz: Ein interdisziplinärer Governance-Ansatz'
2023Co-organization of the shared task MedNLP-SC: Medical Natural Language Processing for Social media and Clinical texts (NTCIR-17).
2023Co-organization of the Biomedical Translation Task at WMT23.
17.01.2023vALID closing symposium in Berlin: "Kollegin KI – Wie sieht die Patientenversorgung der Zukunft aus?".
01.12.2022Talk at RegMed Forum 2022 in Berlin: "When Performance Alone is Not Enough – Challenges and Learnings of a Clinical Decision Support System in Nephrology".
14.10.2022Virtual kick-off meeting of smartNTX.
10.10.2022Accepted paper in Frontiers Public Health
01.09.2022Project start of PRIMA-AI.