Insights from Data: Navigating the Infodemic 2

Wednesday, 8 December 2021

Moderator

Philip AbdelMalik

Team Lead, World Health Organization (WHO)

Philip is an epidemiologist and public health informatician, passionate about creative and cross-disciplinary ways to enhance public health practice and capacity. With over 20 years of experience in the health domain, he currently leads and manages an interdisciplinary team within WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, building and strengthening public health intelligence around the globe. This includes the flagship Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) initiative which is a cornerstone of the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence and the initiative behind this very meeting!

Prior to joining WHO, Philip co-directed the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program and worked extensively with the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Philip’s work has almost always been in the context of emergency preparedness and response activities…including trying to raise two young (mostly adorable) children with his lovely wife from down under.

Philip holds a PhD in Public Health Informatics awarded jointly by the Universities of Plymouth and Exeter in the UK, as well as a Master of Health Science (MHSc) in Epidemiology and Community Health and an Honours BSc with a specialization in Human Biology, both from the University of Toronto, Canada.

Speakers


 

Jens Linge

Scientific Officer, Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission

Jens P. Linge has worked as scientific officer at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission since 2005, after his Ph.D. in Physics at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and postdoctoral research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He joined the text and data mining team in 2008 where he focussed on the development of surveillance tools in the area of public health.

Guillaume Jacquet

Senior Research Scientist in Text Mining, European Commission - Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Scientific Project Officer at the European Commission - Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra (Italy), in the Text and Data Mining Unit (JRC.I3). We aim at developing innovative solutions for retrieving and extracting information from texts, especially from multilingual online news and social media, serving many Commission Services, EU agencies and some EU Member State authorities. Main current contributions: lead the Attitude and Argument Analysis activity inside the Text Mining and Analysis project. Coordinate projects from problem statement to solution implementation. Lead Multilingual and cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition task. Develop and implement hybrid methods, combining Neural, ML, statistical and symbolic approaches, to address information extraction tasks from text. Implement and contribute to the integration of tools related to misinformation detection.

Matthew Howard

Lead for healthcare data science, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Matthew is International Lead for healthcare data science at AWS, focused on how cloud computing, analytics, machine learning and AI can transform health systems and improve patient outcomes. Recent customers include the UK National Health Service, Imperial College London and the World Health Organisation. Matthew has a track record in the design and delivery of advanced analytics and machine learning technologies at local and national level in with particular focus on healthcare. He has worked with international governments on the application of AI and other emerging technologies for policy development and provision of public services. Prior roles to AWS include Director of AI at Deloitte UK and European Lead for Watson Health at IBM, and he has been a member of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence. Matthew’s background includes healthcare analytics, strategic consulting, pharmaceutical development and start-up. He holds a PhD in Biological Sciences from Imperial College London.

Yannan Shen

McGill University

Yannan Shen is in her third year of the Ph.D. program in Epidemiology in the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University. Currently, Yannan’s research focuses on utilizing online news media for the early detection of infectious disease outbreaks. Supervised by Dr. David Buckeridge, her dissertation studies statistical and machine learning strategies for exploiting the structured data extracted from textual news reports by natural language process to improve accuracy and timeliness of outbreak alerting. On a broader scope, her research interests include public health surveillance and health informatics.

Katriona Shea

Alumni Professor in the Biological Sciences and Professor of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University

Professor Shea works on the use of decision theory for management of outbreaks in the face of uncertainty.