Artificial Intelligence to Leverage Biomedical Big Data: a case of COVID-19 Research

Location
Online
Dates
Saturday 1 May 2021 (15:00-16:00)
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Join our masterclass on Artificial Intelligence to Leverage Biomedical Big Data: a case of COVID-19 Research and find out more about data science for the life sciences and our new programme, MSc Bioinformatics, launching in September 2021.

Abstract

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a pandemic. This has led to a global challenge with profound implications for human health and wellbeing, which has continued to date.

Bioinformatics, a.k.a. Data Science for the Life Sciences, has proven essential in the tackling of the pandemic, from sequencing to monitoring and modelling of the disease epidemiology. In this context, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has enormously guided efforts to contain the spread of virus, develop vaccines and mitigate the consequences of COVID-19 infections for public health.

The highly multi-disciplinary Centre for Computational Biology (CCB) at the University of Birmingham has played a central role in the pioneering clinical research on COVID-19, by providing descriptive, diagnostic and prescriptive data-driven insights. In this talk, Professor Jean-Baptiste Cazier, the director of the CCB, will discuss a range of research projects undertaken by the CCB staff, where state-of-the-art AI approaches were combined with big clinical data from high throughput clinical and -Omics tools to understand the epidemiology of COVID-19 and identify risk factors at the population level.

Furthermore, he will present the broad ongoing research programs in other subfields of health data science at the CCB, including but not limited to, human population diversity of the Middle Eastern populations and environmental Bioinformatics. Building upon the excellent expertise at CCB, the center will be founding a new MSc programme in Bioinformatics, i.e. Data Science for the Life Sciences, at the University of Birmingham's Dubai campus, in September 2021. As the first face-to-face postgraduate programme of its kind in the Gulf region, the programme has been designed to address particular existing needs and knowledge gaps in interdisciplinary quantitative biomedical fields in the region.

In the last part of the talk, the outline and content of the programme will be introduced. The talk will present how the rich curriculum of program boosts the employability of prospective students, by equipping them with a set of highly transferable advanced data analytics techniques. This helps the students to undertake any high-quality data science projects on big datasets in academic, commercial and industrial settings, particularly in the biological and healthcare-related sectors.

This event will take place on Zoom and a link will be shared upon booking.

Find out more about MSc Bioinformatics here

Meet the Experts

Profile picture of Professor Jean-Baptiste CazierProf Jean-Baptiste Cazier, Chair of Bioinformatics

Jean-Baptiste Cazier is a Professor of Bioinformatics with interest across the broad spectrum of Computational and Mathematical modelling of natural phenomena. He has three main area of interest: Cancer Genetics, Population Genetics, Swarming and Metabonomics. His life-long goal is to integrate all his eclectic, and ever expending, fields of interest.

Jean-Baptiste was part of a team of colleagues who launched the UK Coronavirus Cancer Monitoring Project – a national project which uses rapid integration of data from across the UK to deliver in near-real-time information to clinicians and cancer patients about how anti-cancer treatments affect COVID-19. 

Read more about Professor Cazier here

Profile picture of Dr Danesh MoradigaravandDr Danesh Moradigaravand, Lecturer at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences

Dr Danesh Moradigaravand graduated with a PhD in Theoretical Biology from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 2014. He became a Lecturer in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Birmingham in 2018. Prior to this position, he was a Senior Bioinformatician and Research Fellow at the Welcome Sanger Institute. Dr Moradigaravand’s research aims to provide a better understanding of evolutionary dynamics of bacterial populations. To this end, he develops theoretical evolutionary genetics models and computational frameworks and conducts genomic data analyses by taking a machine learning approach. In particular, the focus is on the evolution of antibiotic resistance in pathogens in clinical and non-clinical settings.

Read more about Dr Moradigaravand here