Vetle Ingvald Torvik
Visiting Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science (MC 493)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E Daniel St, Room 221
Champaign, IL 61820
Email: vtorvik -at- uic.edu
RESEARCH INTERESTS Mathematical optimization and computational statistics applied to data mining, especially literature-based knowledge discovery and bioinformatics. Please visit the Arrowsmith Project Homepage for a list of current projects.
EDUCATION Ph.D. in Engineering Science, May 24, 2002, Louisiana State University
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery: A Guided Approach Based on Monotone Boolean Functions
Advisor: Professor Evangelos Triantaphyllou, Department of Industrial Engineering

M.S. in Operations Research, June 1997, Oregon State University
A Genetic Algorithm for Model Selection in Linear Regression
Advisor: Professor Jeffrey Arthur, Department of Statistics.

B.A. in Mathematics, May 1995, St. Olaf College
Advisor: Professor James Cederberg, Department of Physics.

POSITIONS
  • 2008-pres: Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Univ. of IL at Urbana-Champaign
  • 2002-2008: Research Assistant Professor, Dept. of Psychiatry, Univ. of IL at Chicago
  • Summer 2007: Summer Faculty Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Univ. of IL at Urbana-Champaign
  • 2001-2002: Visiting Research Specialist in Health Sciences, Dept. of Psychiatry, Univ. of IL at Chicago
  • 1997-2001: Research Assistant, Dept. of Industrial Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA
  • 1996-1997: Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Statistics, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
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    HONORS
  • 2003: LSU Distinguished Dissertation Award.
  • 2003: LSU College of Engineering Exemplary Dissertation Award.
  • 2000: Participant (by invitation) at the INFORMS Doctoral Student Colloquium in San Antonio, TX, USA.
  • 2000-2001: Louisiana Engineering Foundation's Graduate School Fellowship.
  • 1999: Participant (by invitation) at the Doctoral Student Consortium at the DSI National Meeting in New Orleans, LA.
  • 1997-2000: Office of Naval Research sponsored research assistantship.
  • 1995-1996: Oregon State University Graduate Student Laurel Scholarship.
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    ACTIVITIES
  • 2005-pres: Member of the Editorial Board, Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration.
  • 2002-2006: President, SkandoChicago
  • 1996-1997: President, Oregon State Statistics Students Organization.
  • 1993-1994: President, Norwegian Honors House, St Olaf College.
  • Current or past member of: AMIA, ACM, INFORMS, ASA, SIAM, DSI.
  • Ad hoc journal reviewer: PLOS Computational Biology; Genetics; BMC Bioinformatics; Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology; Computers and Industrial Engineering; European Journal of Operations Research; Neuroinformatics; IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part A; IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Part B; European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design.
  • Ad hoc review of NSF SBIR/STTR grant.
  • Sports: Member of the Chicago Inter Handball Club and Innebandy Chicago.
    • FUNDING
  • Co-Investigator, NIH R21 MH081099, Validating microRNA analysis in postmortem brain, 7/07-6/09 (PI: Yogesh Dviwedi,PhD).
  • Co-Investigator, NIH R21 LM08364, Author name disambiguation in MEDLINE, 1/05-7/08 (PI: Neil Smalheiser, MD,PhD).
  • Project Manager, NIH R01 LM07292, Arrowsmith data mining techniques in neuro-informatics, 6/01-5/07 (PI: Neil Smalheiser, MD,PhD).
    •
    PUBLICATIONS Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI . Author name disambiguation. To appear in Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (B. Cronin, Ed.), Vol. 43, 2009.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI . The place of literature-based discovery in contemporary scientific practice. To appear in "Literature-based Discovery" (M. Weeber and P. Bruza, Eds.), Information Science and Knowledge Management series, Springer, 2008.

    Lugli G, Torvik VI, Larson J, Smalheiser NR. Expression of microRNAs and their precursors in synaptic fractions of adult mouse forebrain. Journal of Neurochemistry 2008; 106(2): 650-661.

    Smalheiser NR, Zhou W, Torvik, VI. Anne O'Tate: A tool to support user-driven summarization, drill-down and browsing of PubMed search results. J Biomed Discov Collab. 2008; 3:2. Epub Feb 15.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. Models of microRNA-target coordination. In: "microRNAs: From Basic Science to Disease Biology" (K. Appasani, ed.) 2008, pp. 221-226.

    Torvik VI, Smalheiser NR. A quantitative model for linking two disparate sets of articles in Medline. Bioinformatics 2007; 23(13): 1658-1665.Supplementary figures and tables.

    Zhou W, Yu C, Smalheiser N, Torvik V, Hong J. Knowledge-intensive conceptual retrieval and passage extraction of biomedical literature. Proc. 30th Ann. Intl. ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research & Development on Information Retrieval, in press (this conference was peer-reviewed and had overall 18% acceptance rate).

    Zhou W, Torvik VI, Smalheiser NR. ADAM: another database of abbreviations in Medline. Bioinformatics 2006; 22(22): 2813-2818.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. Alu elements within human mRNAs are probable microRNA targets. Trends in Genetics 2006; 22(10): 532-536. Supplements: file 1(pdf), file 2(xls).

    Zhou W, Yu C, Torvik VI, Smalheiser NR. A concept-based framework for passage retrieval in Genomics. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2006) Baltimore, MD. 2006.

    Swanson DR, Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. Ranking indirect connections in literature-based discovery: The role of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). JASIST 2006;57(11):1427-1439.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI, Bischoff-Grethe A, Burhans LB, Gabriel M, Homayouni R, Kashef A, Martone ME, Perkins GA, Price DL, Talk AC, West R. Collaborative development of the Arrowsmith two node search interface designed for laboratory investigators. J Biomed Discov Collab. 2006 Jul 3;1(1):8.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Discovering rules that govern monotone phenomena. In: "Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Approaches Based on Rule Induction Techniques" (Triantaphyllou and Felici, eds.) Massive Computing Series, Springer-Verlag, 2006, Chapter 4: 149-192.

    Zhang W, Yu C, Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. Segmentation of publication records of authors from the web. Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'06). Atlanta, GA. April, 2006.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. Complications in mammalian microRNA target prediction. In: "MicroRNA: Protocols" (S.-Y. Ying, ed.), Methods in Molecular Biology series, Humana Press, 115-128, 2006.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. Mammalian microRNAs derived from genomic repeats. Trends in Genetics 2005; 21(6): 322-326. Supplements: file 1(pdf), file 2(pdf), file 3(xls).

    Torvik VI, Weeber M, Swanson DR, Smalheiser NR. A probabilistic similarity metric for Medline records:a model for author name disambiguation. JASIST 2005; 56(2): 140-158.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. A population-based statistical approach identifies parameters characteristic of human microRNA-mRNA interactions. BMC Bioinformatics 2004;5:139.

    Smalheiser NR, Torvik VI. A statistical approach predicts human microRNA targets. Genome Biology preprint repository 2004; 5: P4 (database deposited at BMC).

    Brown GG, Pieper S, Martone M, Aucoin N, Joyner A, Bischoff-Grethe A, Torvik V. The Query Atlas: A brain referenced knowledge discovery tool. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, 2004.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E.Guided Inference of Nested Monotone Boolean Functions. Information Sciences 2003; 151: 171-200.

    Torvik, VI. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery: A Guided Approach Based on Monotone Boolean Functions. A Ph.D. Dissertation, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA. 2002.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Minimizing the Average Query Complexity of Learning Monotone Boolean Functions. INFORMS Journal on Computing 2002,14(2), 142-172.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Inference of Monotone Boolean Functions, In: "Encyclopedia of Optimization" (Floudas and Pardalos, editors) Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2, 472-480, 2001.

    Kovalerchuk B, Triantaphyllou E, Ruiz JF, Torvik VI, Vityaev E. The Reliability Issue of Computer-Aided Breast Cancer Diagnosis.Computers and Biomedical Research 2000, 33, 296-313.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Predicting Muscle Fatigue via Electromyography: A Comparative Study. Proceedings of the 25th Int. Conference of Computers and Industrial Engineering 1999, New Orleans, LA, USA, 277-280.

    PRESENTATIONS

    Torvik, VI, Smalheiser, NR. Author name disambiguation in MEDLINE. Poster presented at the NSF Biomedical Informatics Workshop: Expanding Secondary Use of Health Data. Portland, OR, Dec 4-5, 2007.

    Torvik VI. Quantifiable factors that influence the formation of scientific collaborations. Roundtable of the new Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, Aug 14, 2007.

    Torvik VI, Smalheiser NR. Author name disambiguation in MEDLINE: results from first-pass clustering. Invited talk at the Classification Society of North America annual meeting, Urbana-Champaign, IL, June 7-10, 2007.

    Torvik VI, Smalheiser NR. A systematic approach to linking two disparate sets of articles in Medline. Invited seminar (host: Prof. Carole Palmer), GSLIS, UIUC, October 4, 2006.

    Torvik VI. Networks: A perspective from an Operations Research person. Invited 3-hour seminar, UIC Honors College seminar series on Networks organized by Prof. Robert Danzinger, March 6, 2006.

    Torvik VI, Weeber M, Swanson DR, Smalheiser NR. A probabilistic similarity metric for Medline records: a model for author name disambiguation. Poster presented at the 2003 Annual AMIA Symposium in Bethesda, MD.

    Torvik, VI. The Arrowsmith Project. Invited seminar a graduate student Information and Decision Sciences class taught by Prof Arkalgud Ramaprasad. April 8, 2003.

    Smalheiser NR, Yu C, Torvik VI, Wu Z, Raghavan V, Qian H, Men, W. SE-Album: A SELEGO Application in Integrated Retrieval From Multiple Online Bio-Informatics Search Systems Poster presented at the 2003 BISTI Symposium "Digital Biology: The Emerging Paradigm".

    Informatics tools for scientific discovery and collaboration. Arrowsmith Project short course, UIC Psychiatric Institute, September 3-5, 2003. Presenters: Smalheiser NR, Swanson DR, Torvik VI, Palmer C, Cragin M, Hogan T, West R, Bischoff-Grethe A, Yu C.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. "Guided Inference of Stochastic Monotone Boolean Functions", Classification Society of North America annual meeting, June 13-16, 2002. See also paper submitted paper with the same title above.

    Torvik VI, Weeber M, Smalheiser NR, Swanson DR. Identifying Authors that Link Disparate Literatures (2002) Poster presented at the Human Brain Project annual meeting, Bethesda, MD, May 6-7, 2002.

    Torvik, VI. "Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: A Guided Approach to Generating Training Data" (abstract), Invited lecture in the Center for Health Statistics at UIC, May 22, 2002.

    Weeber M, Torvik VI, Swanson DR, Smalheiser NR. Enhanced Feature of the Arrowsmith Search Engine (abstract, and screenshots), electronic computer demonstration at the Human Brain Project annual meeting, Bethesda, MD, May 6-7, 2002.

    Torvik VI. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery: A Guided Approach Based on Monotone Boolean Functions, Ph.D. Dissertation Defense, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, October 30, 2001.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Monotonicity and Guided Logical Analysis of Data (abstract), Invited Seminar, Dept. of Experimental Statistics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, November 13, 2000.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Guided Inference of Stochastic Monotone Boolean Functions INFORMS National Meeting, San Antonio, TX, USA, Nov.5-8, 2000.

    Torvik, VI. Guided Monotone Knowledge Discovery. Poster presented at the NSF site visit of the proposed Engineering Research Center (Center for Trenchless Infrastructure Systems), Louisiana Tech. University, Ruston, LA, USA, February 28, 2000.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Inference of Monotone Boolean Functions and Their Applications to Data Mining 5th Int. Conference of The DSI in Athens, Greece, July 5-8, 1999.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E, Liao TW, Waly SW. Predicting Muscle Fatigue via Electromyography: A Comparative Study 25th Int. Conference of CIE, New Orleans, LA, USA, March 29-31, 1999.

    Torvik VI, Triantaphyllou E. Optimal & Semi-Optimal Strategies for Inferring Monotone Boolean Functions with Membership Inquiries INFORMS National Meeting, Seattle, WA, USA, October 25-28, 1998.

    Last modified: Tue Apr 15 2008