Will Kearns

Health Dialog Researcher

University of Washington

Biography

I’m a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington where I develop technologies that enable machines to understand human emotion and respond in ways that provide therapeutic value.

Interests

Conversational Intelligence
User-centered Design
Affective Computing
Semantic Search

Education

Biomedical and Health Informatics, Ph.D. Candidate, 2015-2021 (expected)
University of Washington
Computational and Life Sciences, B.S. w/ minor in Mathematics, 2009-2014
University of Central Florida
History, B.A., Honors in Major, 2009-2014
University of Central Florida

Experience

Graduate Research Assistant

Center for Innovation in Sleep Self-Management, UW School of Nursing

Jan 2019 – Present

Graduate Research Assistant for the Informatics Core of the Center for Innovation in Sleep Self-Management (CISSM)

Provided informatics support for OPTIMISM (https://www.cissmpregnancystudy.net) and SIPA (https://depts.washington.edu/sipa) projects.
Developed end-user documentation, study protocols, and led training workshops on usability testing hardware, software, and methods including eye-tracking, think aloud, and video/speech annotation
Wrote a systematic review of health dialog systems and other artificial intelligence methods applied to healthcare.

Lead Software Developer

Sep 2018 – Present

Venform

Managed the development and deployment of two iOS applications (currently in beta release)
Designed and implemented an enterprise knowledge graph and predictive analytics engine for link prediction using Cypher Query Language
Delivered an ETL pipeline using Azure Data Factory to ingest health insurance claims into a Microsoft SQL data warehouse
Lead a five member Agile development team

Co-founder, CIO

Feb 2018 – Feb 2020

NURI AI

Built a clinical natural language understanding (NLU) service, HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure, and conversational experiences
Engaged with end-users and healthcare stakeholders to identify a business opportunity and build a sustainable business model
Completed two clinical trials at Seattle Children’s Hospital and Virginia Mason Hospital

NLM Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Sep 2015 – Sep 2018

Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, UW School of Medicine

Improved state-of-the-art models for health question answering
Finalist in the AMIA Student Design Challenge 2016 (2nd place) for the design of a shared decision support tool to improve patient-provider communication using an iterative design cycle that included stakeholder interviews, workflow/artifact analysis, and personas.
Built a hierarchical clustering tool and visual analytics interface for psychologists to view trends between clinical outcomes and patient chat message sequences during cognitive behavioral therapy interventions.