I have been invited to speak at the Dynamics of Immune Responses workshop/seminar/conference in May-June 2020. The invitation arose through my previous efforts to found a company in this space.
There is a growing awareness in the field of immunology of the potential for using mathematical techniques. The wedge-issue here is the cascade of data appearing via new cytometry techniques; large-data looks like a math issue to most people. I of course come from the other side of a spectrum – everything looks like a math issue to me – I wanted to stimulate drug development which engages with immune system dynamics by founding my company.
Happily, we’re all on the same page when it comes to this conference. My understanding is, that this will be a concerted effort by the community to kick-off a long term movement towards looking at immune system dynamics. I can’t wait.
Rather than talking about my company, and the tech we never got around to building, I will talk about Causality. I have a number of interesting mini-projects that I am currently working on. I’m hoping to actually have a strong result by May which will either (i) constrain a-priori the space of hypotheses which are useful for a given dataset, or (ii) allow us to value a dataset without actually using it. This latter topic is something that I know a number of companies are interested in; I have a very different approach to it. Failing the hard math results, I will also have my software library and a translation of how these new techniques can be used by epidemiologists to present.