Maurice Bloch Seminar, Prof Dave Robertson

We are pleased to invite you to:

The Institute of Health and Wellbeing Maurice Bloch Seminar series 2016/17

Title: Automating Healthcare Experiments

Presenter: Professor David Robertson

Date: Wednesday 7 December 2016

Time: 1.30pm tea and coffee will be served 30mins beforehand

Venue: Yudowitz seminar room, Wolfson Medical Building

Chair: Professor Colin McCowan

Abstract:

We are massively increasing our capacity to sense and measure features of people and their environments. This capacity enables precision medicine, where specific combinations of detailed features more precisely characterise medical conditions and their treatments. However, as our ability to classify more rapidly and specifically increases so does the need to access population health data at much larger scale in order to obtain statistically meaningful results. We also can potentially do a much broader variety of experiments, so we need systems that allow many more analyses to be preformed to tighter deadlines. Prevailing computational methods to support this activity have not, currently, caught up with the demand for speed and scale. I shall discuss the role that automated experiments can play in addressing this problem, and how the ability to automate interacts with governance and architecture requirements for data repositories in healthcare, drawing on examples from current research in Farr Scotland and in european data sharing.

Biography

Dave Robertson is Chair of Applied Logic and was appointed Dean of Special Projects in Science & Engineering at the University of Edinburgh in 2014. Prior to this he was Head of School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh. During his five year tenure, working with Dr Liz Elliot, the School doubled its research portfolio and rose from 30 to 12 in the world QS rankings for computing science departments.
His computing research is on formal methods for coordination and knowledge sharing in distributed, open systems using using ubiquitous internet and mobile infrastructure. He was coordinator of the OpenKnowledge project and was a principal investigator on the Advanced Knowledge Technologies research consortium, which were major EU and UK projects in this area. His work on the SociaM EPSRC Programme (social.org) Smart Societies European IP (smart-society-project.eu) and SocialIST coordinating action (social-ist.eu) develops these ideas for social computation. Methods from his group have also been applied to other areas such as astronomy, simulation of consumer behaviour and emergency response but his main application focus is on medicine and healthcare. To this end, he is a member of the Farr Institute for medical data sharing and a co-director of the Centre for Medical Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

He is a Fellow of the British Computing Society and chaired the executive of the UK Computing Research Committee (the expert panel of BCS and IET); is a member of the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team for ICT and of the MRC Population Health Sciences advisory group; is on the Industry Advisory Board for Innovate UK’s ICT programme and is a member of the advisory board for the Scottish Innovation Centre in Data Science.