Electronic medical record (EMR) systems have enabled healthcare providers to collect detailed patient information from the primary care domain. At the same time, longitudinal data from EMRs are increasingly combined with biorepositories to generate personalized clinical decision support protocols. Emerging policies encourage investigators to disseminate such data in a deidentified form for reuse and collaboration, but organizations are hesitant to do so because they fear such actions will jeopardize patient privacy. In particular, there are concerns that residual demographic and clinical features could be exploited for reidentification purposes. Various approaches have been developed to anonymize clinical data, but they neglect temporal information and are, thus, insufficient for emerging biomedical research paradigms. This paper proposes a novel approach to share patient-specific longitudinal data that offers robust privacy guarantees, while preserving data utility for many biomedical investigations. Our approach aggregates temporal and diagnostic information using heuristics inspired from sequence alignment and clustering methods. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate anonymized data that permit effective biomedical analysis using several patient cohorts derived from the EMR system of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Sentiment analysis has attracted a lot of research interest in recent years, especially in the context of social media. While most of this research has focused on English, there is ample data and interest in the topic for many other languages, as well. In this article, we propose a comprehensive sentiment analysis system for Turkish. We cover different levels of sentiment analysis such as aspect, sentence, and document levels as well as some linguistic issues such as conjunction and intensification in Turkish sentiment analysis. Our system is evaluated on Turkish movie reviews and the obtained accuracies range from sixty per cent to seventy-nine per cent in ternary and binary classification tasks at different levels of analysis.

Differential privacy (DP) has gained significant attention lately as the state of the art in privacy protection. It achieves privacy by adding noise to query answers. We study the problem of privately and accurately answering a set of statistical range queries in batch mode (i.e., under non-interactive DP). The noise magnitude in DP depends directly on the sensitivity of a query set, and calculating sensitivity was proven to be NP-hard. Therefore, efficiently bounding the sensitivity of a given query set is still an open research problem. In this work, we propose upper bounds on sensitivity that are tighter than those in previous work. We also propose a formulation to exactly calculate sensitivity for a set of COUNT queries. However, it is impractical to implement these bounds without sophisticated methods. We therefore introduce methods that build a graph model G based on a query set Q, such that implementing the aforementioned bounds can be achieved by solving two well-known clique problems on G. We make use of the literature in solving these clique problems to realize our bounds efficiently. Experimental results show that for query sets with a few hundred queries, it takes only a few seconds to obtain results.