About

Mohamed Abdalla is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on clinical AI and AI ethics. Previously, he was an Assistant Scientist at the AIDE Lab in the Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Natural Language Processing Group (Department of Computer Science) at the University of Toronto in 2022. He was also a Vanier scholar, and was advised by Professor Frank Rudzicz and Professor Graeme Hirst.

Selected Publications by Theme

(Link to: All Publications)

Machine Learning For Health

Data, Labels, Privacy, and Evaluation Methodology

• Empirical data drift detection experiments on real-world medical imaging data
  Nature Communications; (2024)
  Kore A, Bavil EA, Subasri V, Abdalla M, Fine B, Dolatabadi E, Abdalla M.
  [Link]

• Hurdles to AI Deployment: Noise in Schemas and "Gold" Labels
  Radiology: Artificial Intelligence; (2023)
  Abdalla M, Fine B
  [Link] [PDF]

• Exploring the privacy-preserving properties of word embeddings: Algorithmic Validation
  Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR); (2020)
  Abdalla M, Abdalla M, Hirst G, Rudzicz F.
  [Link]

• Using Word Embeddings to Improve the Privacy of Clinical Notes
  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA); (2020)
  Abdalla M, Abdalla M, Rudzicz F, Hirst G.
  [Link]

• Hurtful Words: Quantifying Biases in Clinical Contextual Word Embeddings
  ACM Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL); (2020)
  Zhang H*, Lu A*, Abdalla M, McDermot M, Ghassemi M.
  [Link]

Applications and Evaluations

• The Subgroup Imperative: Chest Radiograph Classifier Generalization Gaps in Patient, Setting, and Pathology Subgroups
  Radiology: Artificial Intelligence; (2023)
  Ahluwalia M, Abdalla M, Sanayei J, Seyyed-Kalantari L, Hussain M, Ali A, Fine B.
  [Link]

• U"AI" testing: User interface and usability testing of a chest x-ray AI tool in a simulated real-world workflow
  Canadian Association of Radiologists Journal; (2022)
  Cheung JLS, Ali A, Abdalla M, Fine B
  [Link]

• WearBreathing: Monitoring Respiratory Rate in-the-wild using a Smartwatch
  ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing 2019; (2019)
  Liaqat D, Abdalla M , Abed-Esfahani P, Gabel M, Son T, Wu R, Gershon A, Alshaer H, Rudzicz F, De Lara E.
  [Link]

• Predicting the target specialty of referral notes to estimate per-specialty wait times with machine learning
  PLoS ONE; (2022)
  Abdalla M, Lu H, Pinzaru B, Rudzicz F, Jaakkimainen L
  [Link]

• Accuracy of algorithms to identify people with atopic dermatitis in Ontario routinely collected health databases
  Journal of Investigative Dermatology; (2021)
  Abdalla M, Chen B, Santiago R, Young J, Eder L, Chan AW, Pope E, Tu K, Jaakkimainen L, Drucker AM.
  [Link]

AI Ethics

• The Grey Hoodie Project: Big Tobacco, Big Tech, and the threat on academic integrity
  In Proceedings, Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES); (2021)
  Abdalla M, Abdalla M
  [Link] [PDF]
  Media Coverage: [WIRED Article] [VentureBeat Article] [FastCompany Article]
  Talks: [Centre for Ethics Talk] [Future of Life Podcast]

• The Elephant in the Room: Analyzing the Presence of Big Tech in Natural Language Processing Research
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL); (2023)
  Abdalla M, Wahle JP, Ruas T, Névéol A, Ducel F, Mohammad SM, Fort K
  [ArXiv Link]

• Collaboration or Corporate Capture? Quantifying NLP's Reliance on Industry Artifacts and Contributions
  Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL); (2024)
  Aitken W, Abdalla M, Rudie K, Stinson C
  [ArXiv Link]

Scientometrics and Bibliometrics

in NLP

• Citation Amnesia: NLP and Other Academic Fields Are in a Citation Age Recession
  arXiv; (2023)
  Whale JP, Ruas T, Abdalla M, Gipp B, Mohammad SM.
  [Link]

• We are Who We Cite: Bridges of Influence Between Natural Language Processing and Other Academic Fields
  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing; (2023)
  Whale JP, Ruas T, Abdalla M, Gipp B, Mohammad SM.
  [Link]

in Medicine

• Tracing the Path of 37,050 Studies into Practice Across 18 Specialties of the 2.4 million Published between 2011-2020
  eLife; (2023)
  Abdalla M, Abdalla S, Abdalla M
  [Link]

• Modeling the Adoption of 5760 Clinical Studies Into Practice Across 5 Surgical Specialties
  Journal of Surgical Research; (2023)
  Abdalla M, Abdalla S, Abdalla M, Jones DB
  [Link]

• Through the Looking-Glass: Insights from the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine
  eLife; (2022)
  Abdalla M, Abdalla M, Abdalla S, Saad M, Jones DS, Podolsky SH
  [Link] [Medical N-Gram Viewer]

• The Under-representation and Stagnation of Female, Black, and Hispanic Authorship in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine
  Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities; (2022)
  Abdalla M, Abdalla M, Abdalla S, Saad M, Jones DS, Podolsky SH
  [Link]
  Media Coverage: [STAT News Article]