Headlines

December 13, 2012
Vaccine Refused, our new project to facilitate data collection from point of refusal, was released in the iTunes App Store for use by U.S. medical professionals.

November 9, 2012
Dr. Philip Polgreen and graduate student Jason Fries were featured on Iowa Public Radio discussing our research on hand hygiene in hospitals. http://news.iowapublicradio.org/post/hospital-acquired-infections

February 1, 2012
Our article The Use of Twitter to Track Levels of Disease Activity and Public Concern in the U.S. During the Influenza A H1N1 Pandemic has won the Robert Wood Johnson’s Foundation Most Influential Research Articles of 2011.

March 4, 2011
Check out our new PLoS One article on Twitter and the H1N1 pandemic.

April 21, 2011
A new iScrub article on Infection Control Today (ICT)! iScrub Phone App Pilot Project Boost Hand Hygiene Compliance

April 4, 2011
iScrub in the news! New iPhone application improved hand hygiene compliance

April 1, 2011
CompEpi presented some new research at the 21st Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA 2011) in Dallas, Texas. Read more

December 1, 2010
Our group was well-represented at the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS 2010) in Park City, Utah. Read more

May 4, 2010
Do health care professionals perform hand hygiene? We’ve got an app for that! Read the press release.

March 17, 2010
The Fifth Decennial International Conference on Healthcare Associated Infections advance press release features CompEpi research.

November 5, 2009
CompEpi graduate students Jason Fries, Donald Curtis, and Chris Hlady were winners in the Faculty/Staff/Graduate Assistant Business Plan Competition, hosted by the UI Business College’s John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, where they pitched the next generation iScrub system.

September 9, 2009
iScrub, our new iPhone/iPod Touch application for infection control professionals, is now available online at the Apple iTunes store.

June 18, 2009
Try our Maximal Coverage Calculator for near-optimal placement of sentinel surveillence sites.

More news…

Alberto Segre

Alberto Maria Segre

Professor and Chair
Gerard P. Weeg Faculty Scholar in Informatics
Department of Computer Science
14D MacLean Hall
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
Tel. (319) 335–1713
Fax. (319) 335–3624

alberto-segre [at] uiowa.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Spring 2013 Teaching

22c:016 Computer Science I
22c:094 Informatics Project

Research Interests

I am primarily interested in distributed algorithms for solving optimization problems. Much of my past work has focused on problems from the biological sciences, including linkage analysis problems from statistical genetics, and protein structure prediction techniques. I have also worked on parallel search algorithms such as A*, alpha-beta-minimax, Davis-Loveland-Putnam, and applications of these algorithms to both standard AI problems and economic problems such as combinatorial auction winner determination.

More recently, I have been interested in solving optimization problems in the health sciences, such as optimal location placement for sentinel surveillance, optimal vaccination strategies, and so on.

Selected Publications

Monitoring Hand Hygiene via Human Observers: How Should We Be Sampling? (with J. Fries, G. Thomas, T. Herman, K. Ellingson and P.M. Polgreen) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 33:7 (July 2012), pp 689–695.

KELVIN: A Software Package for Rigorous Measurement of Statistical Evidence in Human Genetics (with V.J. Vieland, Y. Huang, S.C. Seok, J. Burian, U. Catalyruk, J. O’Connell and W. Valentine-Cooper) Human Heredity, 72:4 (December 2011), pp 276–288.

The Use of Twitter to Track Levels of Disease Activity and Public Concern in the U.S. during the Influenza A H1N1 Pandemic (with A. Signorini and P.M. Polgreen) PLoS ONE, 6:5 (May 4, 2011).

Method for Automated Monitoring of Hand Hygiene Adherence without Radio-Frequency Identification (with P.M. Polgreen, C.S. Hlady, M.A. Severson and T.Herman) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 31:12 (December 2010), pp 1294–1297.

Using Social Networks to Prioritize Vaccination Strategies for Healthcare Workers (with P.M. Polgreen, T. Tassier and S. Pemmaraju) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 31:9 (September 2010), pp 893–900.

A Mobile Handheld Computing Application for Recording Hand Hygiene Observations (with C.S. Hlady, M.A. Severson and P.M. Polgreen) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 31:9 (September 2010), pp 975–977.

Optimizing Influenza Sentinel Surveillance at the State Level (with P.M. Polgreen, E. Chen, M. Harris, M. Pentella and G. Rushton), American Journal of Epidemiology, 170 (November 2009), pp 1300–1306.

An Optimal Multiprocessor Combinatorial Auction Solver (with S. Yang and B. Codenotti), Computers and Operations Research, 36:1 (January 2009), pp 149–166.

Mapping Autism Risk Loci Using Genetic Linkage and Chromosomal Rearrangements (Autism Genome Project), Nature Genetics 39:3 (March 2007), pp. 319–328.

Privacy-Preserving Database Union (with A. Wildenberg, V. Vieland and Y. Zhang), Privacy in Statistical Databases Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4032 (December 2006), pp. 266–276.

Approximation of Multipoint Likelihoods Using Flanking Marker Data: A Simulation Study (with A. George, L. Mangin, C. Bartlett, M. Logue, V. Vieland), BMC Genetics (December 2005), pp. S44.

Nagging: A Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, Paradigm for Distributed Search (with S. Foreman, G. Resta and A. Wildenberg), Artificial Intelligence 140:1–2 (September 2002), pp. 71–106.

A Structured Pattern Matching Approach to Shotgun Sequence Assembly (with S. Kim), Journal of Computational Biology 6:2, (Spring 1999), pp. 163–186.

Nagging: A Distributed, Adversarial Search-Pruning Technique Applied to First-Order Inference (with D.B. Sturgill), Journal of Automated Reasoning 19:3 (December 1997), pp. 347–376.

Exploratory Analysis of Speedup Learning Data Using Expectation Maximization (with G.J. Gordon and C.P. Elkan), Artifical Intelligence 85:1–2 (August 1996), pp.301–319.

A High Performance Explanation-Based Learning Algorithm (with C.P. Elkan), Artificial Intelligence 69:1–2 (September 1994), pp.1–50.

Bounded-Overhead Caching for Definite-Clause Theorem Proving (with D. Scharstein), Journal of Automated Reasoning 11:1 (August 1993), pp. 83–113.

A Critical Look at Experimental Evaluations of EBL (with C.P. Elkan and A. Russell), Machine Learning 6:2, Kluwer Academic (March 1991), pp. 183–196.