Keynote Lectures

Towards the Virtual Human Simulator

 

Brief Bio
Giovanni Saggio received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in Electronic Engineering from the University of Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy, in, respectively, 1991 and 1997. Since 1997 he's an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. His research interests include analog electronics, sensors, biomedical engineering, wearable devices, human-machine interface, brain-computer interfaces.

Academia and Industry: Partners in Leveraging Engineering, Science and Medicine for Clinical Translation

 

Brief Bio
Elazer R. Edelman is the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, where he directs the Institute of Medical Engineering and Science. He is also Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a cardiac intensive care unit cardiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston. Edelman received Bachelor of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in Applied Biology, Master of Science Bioelectrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from MIT, and M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School. Graduate work with Robert Langer defined the mathematics of regulated drug delivery systems. After internal medicine training and clinical fellowship in Cardiovascular Medicine at BWH he was Research Fellow in Pathology at Harvard Medical School with Morris Karnovsky investigating the biology of vascular repair. His research interests meld medical and scientific training leveraging pathophysiologic insight to improve clinical decision-making and device design. Studies of endothelial and vascular biology led to discovery of the mutable dynamic of endothelial state and importance in regulation of vascular diseases and cancer. His group reasoned that optimal control of biologic events recapitulated natural regulation. Hence, polymeric controlled drug delivery systems should mimic natural release and vascular implants devised with intimate knowledge of injury they induce. Perivascular and stent-based drug delivery, mechanical organ support and percutaneous heart valves are examples of the former, and therapeutic tissue engineered endothelial cell constructs of the latter. More than 350 students and fellows have passed through Edelman’s laboratory publishing over 900 scientific articles and 90 patents. Edelman is fellow of American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, Association of University Cardiologists, American Society of Clinical Investigation, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, National Academy of Medicine, and National Academy of Engineering. As Chief Scientific Advisor of Science: Translational Medicine he has set the tone for the national debate on translational research and innovation. As co-founder of ASTM F04.03 he helped create standards for cardiovascular implants. He served on FDA’s Science Board and as ORISE fellow FDA EIR. For bringing cardiovascular translational research to an international level of excellence the Spanish Parliament and King awarded Edelman the Spanish Order of Civil Merit. Most importantly, Elazer is an avid ice hockey goalie, and with his wife Cheryl parents to comedian-writer Alexander, Olympic athlete AJ, and Austin.

Ground-Truthing in the European Health Data Space

 

Brief Bio
Hildebrandt is a Research Professor on ‘Interfacing Law and Technology’ at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), appointed by the VUB Research Council. She is co-Director of the Research Group on Law Science Technology and Society studies (LSTS) at the Faculty of Law and Criminology. She also holds the part-time Chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Science Faculty, at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research interests concern the implications of automated decisions, machine learning and mindless artificial agency for law and the rule of law in constitutional democracies. She received an ERC Advanced Grant for her project on ‘Counting as a Human Being in the era of Computational Law’ (2019-2024), that funds COHUBICOL. In 2022 she has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

Machine Learning Applied to Electronic Health Record Data: Opportunities and Challenges

 

Brief Bio
Riccardo Bellazzi is Full Professor of Bioengineering and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pavia. He is the Director of the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering of the University of Pavia. Moreover, he leads the Laboratory of biomedical informatics at the hospital “Salvatore Maugeri” in Pavia. The scientific interests of Prof. Bellazzi are highly interdisciplinary and are aimed at applications of informatics to medicine and life sciences, comprising artificial intelligence, biomedical data mining, telemedicine, temporal data analysis, decision support, clinical research informatics. He has a longstanding experience in ICT applications for Diabetes management. Prof. Bellazzi has a wide and internationally recognized research activity. In 2000 he founded the working group on "Intelligent Data Analysis and Data Mining" of the International Association of Medical Informatics (IMIA). In 2009 he became a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics for his international achievements. He is a Founding Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), and he was Vice-President for Medinfo of IMIA in the period 2011-2014. He is and was involved in several EU-funded projects related to IT in medicine and bioinformatics. Finally, he is co-founder of the academic spin-offs Biomeris, which implements software to support clinical research, and Engenome, which is specialized on the analysis of Next Generation Sequencing data with AI approaches.