I am beginning a new project this week, the topic is Causal Inference. This is something I have been reading about, and wrestling with, for quite some time. Now seems a good point to take some time out, form a project, and see what I can get done on the topic.
Continue reading “New Project: Causal Inference”Keynote @ Charité Berlin
Apparently, it’s that time again. I just gave my second invited keynote at a conference at Charité Berlin. It was really fun.
The audience were dentists – academic dentists. I confess that I struggled to understand why they thought I would be a good fit for their conference. My previous keynote was at the BIH Digital Health Forum – a much more obviously appropriate audience. But, perhaps strangely, the fit was very good.
Continue reading “Keynote @ Charité Berlin”Fosanis: A Brave New Project
I started working at a new job last week. I am now the Head of Data Science at Fosanis GmbH. We’re a startup in Berlin, two years old, and we provide support services for cancer patients. My task is to personalise the approach.
Think personalised medicine, without the medicine. The content we provide has been professionally curated and has been shown to be beneficial to cancer patients. If you speak German, you can try out the content online right now. We will be launching an App-based implementation in the new year.
I want to then take this to the next level. Patients will be treated as a combination of their statistical attributes and their individual trajectories through the interface. From a technological point-of-view, we will be aping many of the approaches pioneered by Facebook. However, we will try to maximise a much trickier to define Quality of Life metric, rather than page refreshes or time spent on the Wall.
This is a really exciting project. I have been looking for a while to find a project where I can apply behavioural modelling approaches to healthcare goals. In a world of rapidly expanding autoimmune diseases I see this ultimately as the new treatment paradigm. What is especially nice is that, in the space in which we are operating there are no real conflicts of interest. I hope that I don’t look back on that statement as hopelessly naive. My impression is that most people in oncology are really trying to make patients’ lives better.
We will be hiring in the first couple of months of 2019, so if you know any talented biological modellers who might be interested, please tell them to email me their CV.
Video: PyData Berlin 2018 talk online
The hosts of PyData Berlin 2018 have published the video of my talk on YouTube. I previously described the talk in detail in my post on AI in Healthcare.
PyData Berlin 2018
PyData Berlin 2018 will be taking place this weekend. I will be in attendance and, on Saturday, will present a talk on AI in Healthcare.
The abstract I submitted is woefully inadequate. Luckily, I was able to write a more coherent description in the message to the organisers and they were gracious enough to accept me.
I will be talking about my main hobby-topic: why you can’t just throw the current black-box methods at biological problems and expect it to work out.
The talk is the same as one I gave as a keynote in private session at the Digital Health Forum of the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), in March. The feedback from the BIH was so positive that I wanted to open this topic up to a wider audience (this version will also have a video posted online).
I will write up the talk as an article and post it here in a week or so.