Symposium at AAAS

The theme of this year AAAS conference was ‘Envisioning tomorrow’s Earth’. Together with colleagues from the University of Lancaster and John’s Hopkins, the VPH institute had put in a proposal for a symposium on “Bioinformatics and AI: Innovative Approaches to Research and Data Storage” that made it through the touch AAAS competition.

Synopsis

The challenges of maintaining population health in a rapidly-changing environment are evolving faster than researchers can respond. Climate change, shifting disease patterns, population demographics, and environmental pollution present multiple interacting threats which require urgent, evidence-based responses. However, traditional models of research conduct, publication, and analysis can take years to provide policy-makers with decision-critical information.

This symposium presented three expert perspectives on how the AI revolution in bioinformatics is transforming our conception of how scientific research should be stored, published, accessed and used. They described how next-generation knowledge systems will optimize the use of existing scientific data, vastly increasing the accessibility of scientific evidence for the development of effective health policy.

The following themes were presented: 

• how social media platforms and AI could revolutionize research and data storage; 
• how big data allows scientists to better-anticipate health risks posed by an increasingly polluted environment
• an introduction to an in silico biological system for developing and testing medical treatments.

Speakers

• Paul Whaley (Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom): Knowledge Systems for the Anthropocene
• Thomas Hartung (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD): AI in Environmental Health: From Data Poverty to Factfulness and Evidence
• Liesbet Geris (University of Liège, Liège, Belgium & VPH Institute): The Virtual Physiological Human

Full information on the event can be found at https://meetings.aaas.org/