Biomedical Informatics: International Conference
The conference will take place on December 13-14, and will be a meeting ground for experts in the fields of medicine, engineering, computer science and biomedicine. The aim is to promote the field of personalized medicine whereby treatments are precisely tailored to individual patients. The conference is headed by Prof. Roy Kishony and Dr. Kira Radinsky, of the Lorry Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering at the Technion
On December 13-14, Technion will host an international conference on biomedical informatics. This field is expected to generate massive change in the world of medicine and is based on computerized analysis of the data amassed in academia, hospitals and health clinics, using deep learning and Big Data technologies. The goal is to precisely tailor medical treatments to individual patients.
“Biomedical informatics is the basis of the new paradigm that will create a direct bridge between basic research and the clinic,” explains Prof. Roy Kishony, head of the Lorry Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering. “Imagine a future of ‘preventive medicine’ that will provide techniques for diagnosing diseases prior to their outbreak – a diagnosis that will make it possible to predict the future and create a treatment that is better suited to the patient.”
“In the past, scientists used to think in terms of a single hypothesis, which they would study for many years,” explains Dr. Kira Radinsky, acclaimed scientist and visiting professor at Technion. “We are working to create a completely new approach to the way the science works. My research focuses on the question of how we can take everything that is known to humanity, in text format, and create artificial intelligence systems that will read all of this information, identify recurring patterns in the past, and predict the future.”
Prominent researchers from a wide spectrum of fields will take part in the conference:
Jonathan Adiri will deliver the keynote lecture on “The Era of Permanent Revolution” – an era in which technology is developing rapidly and the prices of products are plunging. This combination presents a host of challenges that are economic, political, and security-related. Adiri, a serial entrepreneur who served as President Shimon Peres’s Chief Technology Officer, is the founder of Getaround and was the president of the inaugural class of Singularity University, which was founded by NASA, MIT and Google. Adiri was among the ‘100 Young Global Leaders’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. A recent Economist piece attributed to Yonatan the “Rise of Medical Selfies”, as his company (www.healthy.io) is the first to transform an embedded smartphone camera into a clinical grade medical device. He’s a frequent contributor to leading media outlets such as CNBC, BBC Wired Magazine and the Financial Times and has recently debated (Davos, 2017) the macro trends of technology and economic inequality alongside Nobel Laureates Robert Shiller and Angus Deaton.
John Wilbanks of Sage Bionetworks, an NGO that promotes science, will speak about the ethical aspects of precision medicine. Wilbanks is the founder of Incellico, a bioinformatics company that developed technologies for research and development of medicine. ‘Seed’ magazine defined him as a game-changer, and ‘Utne Reader’ magazine named him one of the 50 people who are changing the world. At his TED talk in 2012, he spoke about the problems of providing access to extensive medical data for the benefit of medical breakthroughs while preserving patient privacy. (https://www.ted.com/talks/john_wilbanks_let_s_pool_our_medical_data)
Isaac Kohane of the Harvard Medical School will address the role of doctors in the age of AI. (TED talk: http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=17961)
Additional lecturers include Prof. Ze’ev Ronai, head of the Technion’s Integrative Cancer Center; Prof. Shai Shen-Orr from the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine; Ran Balicer, Director of Health Policy Planning at the Clalit Health Fund; Varda Shalev, Director of the Institute of Research and Innovation Maccabitech; and researchers from academia, industry and the health system.
Conference Leaders
Dr. Kira Radinsky began studying Computer Science at Technion at the age of 15. She completed her three degrees in the Faculty of Computer Science: a BSc as part of the Rothschild Scholars Program for Excellence, and an MSc and PhD supervised by Prof. Shaul Markovitch. While pursuing her Masters, she developed a methodology for predicting future events based on Internet queries. She looked for peaks in the appearance of specific terms in these queries and used them to analyze causative patterns between different events. As a result, she successfully predicted such events as the rise in oil prices following hurricanes, unrest in Sudan after the cancellation of gas subsidies, a rise in iPad prices following a tsunami, and outbreaks of Ebola epidemics after earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Dr. Radinsky founded SalesPredict based on the technology developed during her Technion studies. The company was later acquired by eBay. Following the acquisition, Radinsky was appointed eBay’s Chief Scientist in Israel. Working in cooperation with health funds, she is developing methods to forecast medical problems based on the overall data available in personal medical files and in medical literature. Dr. Radinsky will lecture on “Predicting the Future in Medicine Using Data Science.”
Prof. Roy Kishony, a member of the Biology and Computer Science Faculties, joined the Technion in 2014 from the Harvard Medical School where he was a tenured professor. He is the head of the Lorry Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering at Technion. Prof. Kishony’s wide-ranging research includes the spread of epidemics, evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and coexistence of different species in a given space. In 2016, Prof. Kishony’s article in ‘Science,’ presented an innovative platform that tracks real-time evolution of bacteria while they develop resistance to antibiotics. This platform was the first demonstration showing the link between genetic adaptation and spatial constraints: https://vimeo.com/180908160. The video was screened at the UN during an assembly on antibiotics resistance. At the conference, Prof. Kishony will lecture on “Predicting Antibiotic Resistance.”
Click here for full conference program.