Lakehead University
Ontario, Canada
By Prof. Rachid Benlamri, Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada.
The present landscape of healthcare is one of escalating costs coupled with an aging population with increasing complexity in concurrent chronic medical illnesses. Care provisioned to these patients relies on data from different sources, such as archives of medical history records, laboratory test results, diagnostic images, prescribed medication, and data from monitoring equipment and wearables. This enormous amount of heterogeneous complex medical data is currently stored and treated by most healthcare organizations in isolation. However, Semantic Web technologies and big data tools have the potential to create significant value by improving outcomes of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine while lowering costs. This presents an urgent need for solving data semantic interoperability issues, which are crucial towards developing novel ways to expose, structure, and exchange healthcare information. Also, this will allow for developing new, scalable and expandable big data infrastructure and analytical methods that can enable healthcare providers access and exchange knowledge in a timely manner, thus providing better outcomes. This talk addresses the above-mentioned challenges by discussing the role of Semantic Web and data analysis for generating high quality actionable data that makes big data robust. Also, we will discuss some of the technical challenges in using big data and the need for a semantic data-driven infrastructure based on ontology design, EHR standards, clinical pathway automation, and machine learning to address them.
Biography
Rachid Benlamri is a Professor of Software Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at Lakehead University, Canada. He obtained his Master and PhD from the University of Manchester – UK. Professor Benlamri is the head of the Semantic Web and Mobile Computing Lab at Lakehead University. His research interests are in the area of Semantic Web, Data Science, Ubiquitous Computing and Mobile Knowledge Management. His research is funded by many institutions, such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada, Ontario Center of Excellence, Academic Health Science Centers of Ontario, and the Ontario Partnership for Innovations and Commercialization. He supervised over 80 students and postdoctoral fellows. He served as keynote speaker, and general chair for many international conferences. Professor Benlamri is a member of the editorial board for many international journals, such as the International Journal of Mobile Communications, the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, and the International Journal of Business Data Communications and Networking. He has authored/co-authored six books and over 100 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings.
