Distinguished Colloquium Speaker: Ophir Frieder

Untraditional Medicine

Computing continues to change the landscape of nearly all domains, medicine included. For instance, drug resistance is predicted and avoided via data mining applications, and disease outbreak is detected early via text mining techniques. These are but just some examples where computing is reshaping medical practice. Specifically, capitalizing on distributed "sensors", we describe the monitoring of social media to detect disease outbreak and describe the implications of such surveillance schemes to healthcare planning for a major children-focused hospital. We continue by describing a deployed distributed data unification system that integrates dispersed medical history, forming patient-centered, life-long medical records; such integration enables accurate mining approaches, likewise described, that significantly improve drug prescription accuracy.

Bio: Ophir Frieder holds the Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. Chair in Computer Science and Information Processing and previously served as the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He is also Professor of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics and Biomathematics in the Georgetown University Medical Center. In addition to his academic positions, he is the Chief Scientific Officer for Invaryant, Inc. (formerly UMBRA Health, LLC.) and a Research Associate at the Institute of Information Science and Technology at the Italian National Research Council (ISTI-CNR). He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and NAI, and a Member of Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Host: Xiaodong Zhang
Sponosored by CSE and Biomedical Informatics Departments