Works
An index of publications, presentations, patents, press coverage, and public roles.
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Mapping LIDC, RadLex™, and Lung Nodule Image Features
Pia Opulencia, David S. Channin, Daniela S. Raicu, Jacob D. Furst
Journal of Digital Imaging, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 256–270 (April 2011)
Published online: March 23, 2010
The paper investigates the feasibility of mapping Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) characteristics and terminology to RadLex™, the RSNA's radiological lexicon. The goal was to establish a more standardized annotation system to reduce subjective variability between radiologist interpretations and enable computer-aided diagnostic tools. 74% of tested LIDC terms found matches in RadLex.
Conducted as part of the Visual Informatics and Data Analytics (VIDA) Group, Medical Informatics (MedIX) Laboratory, College of Computing and Digital Media, DePaul University. Co-directors: Daniela Stan Raicu and Jacob D. Furst.
- PubMed — PMID: 20390436 · PMCID: PMC3056962
- Springer / Journal of Digital Imaging — DOI: 10.1007/s10278-010-9285-6
- PubMed Central (free full text)
Conference Presentations & Speaking
Mapping LIDC, RadLex, and Lung Nodule Image Features
Pia Opulencia, Jacob D. Furst, Daniela S. Raicu
RSNA 2008: 94th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America
November 30 – December 5, 2008 · McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois
Oral/poster presentation of the research that preceded the 2011 journal publication. Conducted through the Visual Informatics and Data Analytics (VIDA) Group / MedIX Laboratory at DePaul CDM. The RSNA annual meeting is the world's largest medical imaging conference.
DePaul University Visual Informatics and Data Analytics Group Publications List
Data Science/Advanced Analytics: The Race to Game-Changing Products & Insights
Chicago Product Management Association · July 2015 · Panelist/Speaker
Panel on how Chicago companies were using data science, predictive analytics, and text analytics to drive product and business decisions. Framed for product managers: not whether to use data science, but how and when. Hosted by the Chicago Product Management Association.
Machine Learning: Practical Tips for Product Development
Women In Product · May 2018 · Panelist
Panel targeting product managers working with ML — what problems are best suited to machine learning, how product/data/engineering collaborate on ML projects, and launch readiness signals. Described as drawing from senior-level tech leaders at both established companies and startups.
Product Management at an IoT Startup
Kellogg Tech Club Evening-Weekend (KTech EW) · June 30, 2018 · Speaker
Solo talk at the Kellogg School of Management covering product management in IoT startups, with Hologram Inc. as the primary case study. Covered cellular connectivity infrastructure, IoT product development patterns, and the intersection of analytics/AI with hardware platform products. 59 registered attendees. Kellogg CampusGroups event page
8th Light AI Summit 2024
Chicago · July 2024 · Organizer / Speaker
An event I designed and produced alongside 8th Light's go-to-market team — bringing together software professionals in product, design, and technology for a day of practical AI work at 8th Light's Chicago office. Featured a keynote by Dan Mason (Head of AI at Stride, now at Anthropic) on LLM opportunities and business outcomes, followed by sessions on AI product design methodologies, hands-on workshops where attendees evaluated their own organizations through an AI lens, and a group discussion on AI governance and workforce impact.
8th Light Hosts AI Summit 2024
August 15, 2024
CincyAI Week 2024
Cincinnati, OH · July 2024 · Panelist / Workshop Lead
Cincinnati's inaugural CincyAI Week, where 8th Light participated as a member of the host committee. Joined a panel illuminating how workforce upskilling and software development practices are changing in the age of AI — fielding audience questions on best uses of AI from experience, technology selection and management, and process changes across product, design, and engineering.
Reflecting on CincyAI Week 2024
August 2, 2024
1871 ScaleUp 2025 — Panel
Chicago · June 2025
Panel at 1871's ScaleUp 2025 event covering AI's potential to reshape industries, the future of work, evolving practices in farming and food systems, and the role of trust and human-centered values in innovation. Co-panelists: Stuart Bernstein, Caroline Vial Ph.D. BCC, and Jeff Judge.
The AI Lab Academy Tour — Panel
Chicago · August 2025
Panelist. Touching on aspects of enterprise AI governance, impacts on society and humanity.
Patents
Patents assigned through Narrative Science pertaining to automatic generation of narratives from data using communication goals and narrative analytics. Now held within Salesforce / Tableau following the December 2021 acquisition.
Automatic Generation of Narratives from Data Using Communication Goals and Narrative Analytics -- Patent Family
Authored Articles & Guest Posts
5 Ways Businesses Can Capitalize on Smart Data Discovery Tools
CIO Dive, October 31, 2016
Guest opinion piece written as Director of Technical Product Management at Narrative Science. Argues that smart data discovery tools require more rigorous analytic best practices from organizations, not less — covering transparency and auditability, domain expertise, documentation of assumptions, tracking actionability, and data scientist involvement in evaluations. Filed under IT Strategy and Big Data.
The Fuse and The Flint — 8th Light
Co-host and recurring guest, 2024–2025
8th Light's podcast on software strategy and AI.
"Designing For AI: Principles, Frameworks, and Practical Insights" (January 14, 2025, inaugural episode) — Co-hosted with Jeff Mielke, Design Director at 8th Light. Covers responsible AI design frameworks, user-centered AI integration, and fairness/transparency in AI-driven applications.
"AI-Assisted Coding: Avoiding 'Chair Pants'" (March 4, 2025) — Co-hosted with Pierce Edmiston. Covers the limits of AI-assisted coding, the risks of treating LLMs as magic bullets, and measuring long-term impact beyond efficiency.
Press & Media Coverage
Personnel Announcements
Evive Announces Two Vice Presidents of Product to Support Growth Trajectory
PRWeb / PRNewswire, November 16, 2021
Announcement of Pia Opulencia joining Evive as VP of Product, US, alongside Shashidhar Akkihebbal as VP of Product India.
Industry Context
Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?
Wired, April 2012
Feature on Narrative Science and Quill — the NLG platform Pia worked on as Director of Technical Product Management. Includes Kris Hammond's prediction that 90% of news would be machine-written within 15 years.
Northwestern Engineering coverage of the Wired piece
Salesforce Acquires Narrative Science
Tableau / Salesforce announcement, December 2021
Narrative Science, including its Quill NLG platform and associated patent portfolio, was acquired by Salesforce and integrated into Tableau.
Tableau blog announcement
Narrative Science — Wikipedia
Academic & Teaching
1871 Chicago — Expert in Residence (EIR), Product
Serving as Product Expert in Residence as part of 1871's EIR program. 1871 is Chicago's flagship technology incubator and innovation hub. The EIR role involves mentorship, advising, and programming support for founders and operators in the 1871 ecosystem.
Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering
Adjunct Lecturer, MBAi Program
Faculty Profile
MBAi Program
Formative Roles
On the Hologram customer base: Among the most memorable Hologram customers were global developers, nonprofits, and independent innovators using cellular IoT for applications well outside the enterprise mainstream — wildlife conservation (Paso Pacifico embeds fake sea turtle eggs with Hologram SIMs to track poachers), remote agricultural monitoring (CSAD's Raspberry Pi + Hologram Nova automated crop care system, winner of Hologram's "Best in Remote Monitoring" contest on Hackster.io), medical device connectivity, and drone infrastructure in regions where ground-level carrier coverage is unreliable. These use cases — particularly the intersection of IoT, agriculture, and distributed sensing — directly informed the homestead infrastructure thinking that came later. See: How We're Helping to Build a Better Tomorrow · How IoT Drones Will Be Used in New Ways · CSAD IoT Crop Care Project
Mattersight Corporation (formerly eLoyalty)
Featured Project: Predictive Fraud Detection — Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, United States
Data Science, Analytics & Consulting Role
Developed predictive models for Medicare fraud detection using text extractions from transcribed call center audio. The transcription source material was noisy and poorly structured — converted from audio to text with significant degradation — requiring custom RegEx-based rule parsers to extract meaningful signal from nonstandard language. This was pre-NLP-at-scale; the best available tool was a sufficiently determined regular expression.
Also worked with on-premise voice capture servers — an early foray into software product development before the discipline had standardized vocabulary for what that work was. The combination of messy text, hand-crafted extraction rules, and predictive modeling prefigures the problem space that Narrative Science would later tackle from the generation side.
Behavioral Research Associates, LLC
Research Consultant (part-time)
~2007 · Concurrent with final year at DePaul University
First professional position, held part-time while finishing a senior year at DePaul — arranged as course credit to make the hours workable. Work included analyzing EBRI research on retirement plan participation, savings behavior, and leakage; and examining financial institution prospectuses to understand how communication design and framing affected retirement fund decision-making across different population segments. An early foray into language analysis: how the structural and rhetorical choices in a document — what you call something, how you sequence it, what anchors you set — change what people actually do.
Portfolio & Professional Profiles
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/piaopulencia
GitHub Arctic Code Vault Contributor
The most random discovery about myself is that I am apparently a GitHub Arctic Code Vault Contributor. Not only is it buried in Svalbard (my daughter is named after the main character in Golden Compass, who has adventures in Svalbard in the main story line), but I had absolutely no idea this happened until I was putting this biography together with my buddy, Claude.
In February 2020, GitHub photographed the entirety of active open-source code on its platform — 21 terabytes across 186 reels of archival film — and physically deposited it in a decommissioned coal mine inside a mountain in Svalbard, Norway, hundreds of meters into permafrost. The stated goal: preserve the record of open-source software for 1,000 years. Contributors whose code was captured in the snapshot received the Arctic Code Vault Contributor achievement, which was a one-time award and is no longer earnable.
The magicpia GitHub profile carries this badge which was unlocked February 2, 2020. Specific repositories archived include magic-network/magic-protocol, magic-network/magic-cli, and magic-network/magic-agent, among others. These repositories represent internal R&D work done during the Hologram Inc. tenure — exploratory research into whether Hologram's deep expertise in cellular technologies, networking, and data-driven experiences could support a next-generation internet service protocol. The work was incubated at Hologram as an alpha-stage product concept and retired.
- GitHub Arctic Code Vault Program
- magicpia GitHub profile
- magic-network GitHub Repository: Magic is a decentralized internet connectivity network that routes traffic through a distributed mesh of gateways — both individual nodes and established carriers — to deliver seamless, secure internet access without data caps, throttling, or carrier data mining. Anyone can run a gateway using standard off-the-shelf hardware and earn tokens for providing coverage, essentially crowdsourcing a global alternative to traditional ISPs.
Last updated: March 2026