James Geller
Professor, Data Science
2103 Guttenberg Information Technologies Center (GITC)
About Me
Move fast and break things - Mark Zuckerberg

Dr. James Geller is Professor and Chair of the Department of Data Science in the Ying Wu College of Computing at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He received his MS and PhD degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1988 in Computer Science, with a focus on AI/Knowledge Representation. Dr. Geller cofounded SABOC (the Structural Analysis of Biomedical Ontologies Center) at the Department of Computer Science at NJIT. He has published over 200 journal papers, conference papers and book chapters in Medical Informatics, Semantic Web Technology, Object-Oriented Database Modeling, Knowledge Representation, etc. Previously, Dr. Geller was Co-Principal Investigator on several grants from NIH on auditing methods, abstraction/summarization algorithms and software tools for important medical terminology systems such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and SNOMED CT. He was co-PI on an NSF grant for teaching Cyber Security (iSECURE). From 2014 to 2019 he was co-PI on an NIH grant on family-based quality assurance for Biomedical Ontologies. Currently he is co-PI on an NSF grant on "Increasing Urban Youth Participation in Computing through Mentorship and Coding Resources." He is also an investigator on the New Jersey (NJ) ACTS program of Rutgers, Princeton, and NJIT. Dr. Geller is a founding participant of the BRAID Consortium of Harvey Mudd College and is actively involved in bringing women and minorities into the computing field. In 2012 Dr. Geller was inducted as a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). Dr. Geller received the NJIT Master Teacher Designation (2005) and three other NJIT teaching awards in 2002, 2003 and 2011. Dr. Geller also received an NJIT College Research Award (2010).
Education
Ph.D. ; SUNY at Buffalo ; Computer Science ; 1988

M.S. ; SUNY at Buffalo ; Computer Science ; 1984

Diplom Ingenieur (roughly a German Master's degree) ; Technische Universitaet Wien ; Electrical Engineering ; 1979

2025 Fall Courses
DS 700B - MASTER'S PROJECT

CS 488 - INDEPENDENT STUDY IN CS

DS 792B - PRE-DOCTORAL RESEARCH

CS 489 - COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH PROJ

CS 632 - ADV DATABASE SYSTEM DESIGN

CS 700B - MASTER'S PROJECT

CS 701B - MASTER'S THESIS

DS 701B - MASTER'S THESIS

DS 701C - MASTER'S THESIS

DS 725 - INDEPENDENT STUDY I

DS 726 - INDEPENDENT STUDY II

CS 725 - INDEPENDENT STUDY I

CS 726 - INDEPENDENT STUDY II

CS 790A - DOCT DISSERTATION & RES

CS 792 - PRE-DOCTORAL RESEARCH

DS 790A - DOCT DISSERTATION & RES

Teaching Interests
Databases
Past Courses
CS 632: ADV DATABASE SYS DESIGN

CS 632: ADVANCED DATABASE SYSTEM DESIGN

CS 639: ELEC MEDICAL RECORDS:COMP IMP

CS 698: ST:

CS 698: ST:MEDICAL DICTIONARY COMP SYS

DS 632: COMPUTING WITH ADVANCED DATA REPRESENTATIONS

Research Interests
Medical Informatics, Semantic Web, Ontologies, Medical Terminologies
In Progress
Medical Ontology in Virtual Reality
The project focuses on Visualizing complex medical ontologies with thousands of nodes in VR. We are in the second phase of the project. We are actively writing the results of our first user study and developing an experiment for the second user study.

Journal Article
Navya M. Kollapally, James Geller, Vipina K. Keloth, Zhe He, Julia Xu. 2025. "Ontology enrichment using a large language model: Applying lexical, semantic, and knowledge network-based similarity for concept placement. ." Journal of Biomedical Informatics , vol. 168 .

Chih-yuan Li, Soon A Chun, James Geller. 2025. "Perspective-Based Microblog Summarization." Information , vol. 16 , no. 4 .

Navya M. Kollapally, James Geller, Patricia Morreale, Daehan Kwak. 2024. "An Ontology for Social Determinants of Education (SDoEd) Based on Human-AI Collaborative Approach." Journal of Computing Science in Colleges , vol. 40 , no. 3 .

James Geller. 2024. "Teaching computing and experiencing grief in the year 1 AC (after ChatGPT) [Opinion Article]." , vol. 9 .

V K Keloth, S Zhou, L Lindemann, L Zheng, G Elhanan, A J Einstein, James Geller, Yehoshua Perl. 2023. "Mining of EHR for interface terminology concepts for annotating EHRs of COVID patients.." BMC medical informatics and decision making , vol. 23 , no. Suppl 1 , pp. 1-18.

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Conference Paper
"Population Group 2.0: Bringing the UMLS Semantic Network up to Speed"
May, 2025.

"Using clinical entity recognition for curating an interface terminology to aid fast skimming of EHRs"
IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), December, 2024.

"Continuous Evaluation for a Multi-Dimensional Violent Crime Prevention and Recovery Policy"
ACM, June, 2024.

"Enhanced Multi-Class Detection of Fake News"
AAAI Press, May, 2024.

"Hyperparameter Optimization Using Genetic Algorithm for Extracting Social Determinants of Health Text"
SCITEPRESS, February, 2024.

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Conference Proceeding
"Toward Policy Transparency and Real-Time Policy Assessment"
July (3rd Quarter/Summer), 2023.

"Multiple View Summarization Framework for Social Media"
January (1st Quarter/Winter), 2023.

"An Ontology for the Social Determinants of Health Domain"
December, 2022.

"Characterizing Android Medical Apps"
14th International Conference on e-Health 2022 (EH 2022), July (3rd Quarter/Summer), 2022.

"Stemming the Tide of Fake News about the COVID-19 Pandemic"
35th FLAIRS Conference 2022 Proceedings, May, 2022.

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Other
"Tribal abstraction network"
US20170039295A1, 2017.

""
US9286381B2, 2016.

"Optimized ontology based internet search systems and methods"
US9262527B2, 2016.

"How to Summarize Big Knowledge Subjects"
International Conference on Biological Ontology & BioCreative, August, 2016.

"Professionalize CS Education Now. Letter to the Editor. "
Communications of the ACM (July 2016), July (3rd Quarter/Summer), 2016.

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Chapter
X. Ji, S. A. Chun, James Geller. "Knowledge-based tweet classification for disease sentiment monitoring." "Studies in Computational Intelligence," pp. 425-454. 2016.

Yoo Jung An, Kuo-Chuna Huang, Soon Ae Chun, James Geller. "A formal approach to evaluating Medical ontology systems using Naturalness." "Innovations in Data Methodologies and Computational Algorithms for Medical Applications," pp. 1-18. 2012.

James Geller. "Ontologies and Medical Terminologies." In John Wang, eds., pp. 1463-1469. Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining, Second Edition, IGI Global, 2009.

X. Zhou, James Geller. "Raising, to enhance rule mining in Web marketing with the use of an ontology." "Data Mining with Ontologies: Implementations, Findings, and Frameworks," pp. 18-36. 2007.

James Geller, S. Parikh, S. Krishnan. "Blog mining for the Fortune 500." "Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)," pp. 379-391. 2007.

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Book
Xiaoxia Yin, James Geller, Ye Li, Rui Zhou, Hua Wang, Yanchun Zhang. "Deep self-taught learning for detecting drug abuse risk behavior in tweets." Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 10038 2016 Health Information Science 5th International Conference Proceedings, 2016.

Magazine/Trade Publication
"Beware BYOD"
Communications of the ACM, September, 2013.

Translation or Transcription
"How Science Can Ensure Integrity and Quality: A Thesis (Reprinted by Request of Editor)"
Canadian Association of University Teachers Bulletin, April (2nd Quarter/Spring), 2012.

"How Science Can Ensure Integrity and Quality: A Thesis"
Academe, January (1st Quarter/Winter), 2012.