Dear All -------------------------------------------------------- Translational informatics research for decision support in biomedicine Start: 12/14/2012 1:30 pm End: 12/14/2012 3:30 pm Departmental Colloquium Dr. Alfredo Tirado-Ramos <http://www.cfar.emory.edu/bio/investigator/tirado-ramos.html> Assistant Professor Biomedical Informatics Department School of Medicine Emory University Decision support is a broad field that aims to help people in making good decisions in complex environments. One of the tools available to scientists, informatics, provides languages to study and understand complex multiscale, multiscience systems, based on a fixed universe of possibilities that considers the "known knowns" and the "known unknowns", rooted in the early work on foundations of decision making by Von Neumann and Morgenstern. Computer-based decision support has been widely applied in economics, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and statistics knowledge-based systems. Good examples of such systems include rule-based reasoning methodologies and simulation-based scenarios, quite popular in biomedical science. When it comes to human systems, though, things tend to get complex. Humans include unique and distinguishable components, all the way from biological cells made of thousands of molecules to our society of more than 6 billion interacting individuals. The complete cascade from genome to health forms multi-scale systems and crosses many orders of magnitude in temporal and spatial scales. Understanding, quantifying, and handling this complexity are some of the biggest scientific challenges of our time. In this talk we highlight the importance of this challenge and show a couple of biomedical decision support use cases where bioinformatics, health informatics and public health informatics bridge knowledge from each other, from laboratory bench to patient bedside. About the Speaker: Dr. Alfredo Tirado-Ramos holds appointments at Emory University as Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, College of Arts and Sciences, and as Senior Scientist at the Emory Center for Comprehensive Informatics. He regularly chairs committees in international conferences on computing in biomedicine and the life sciences, as well as teaching computational science. He also currently directs the Emory Center for AIDS Research Biomedical Informatics Core and is an active member of the the Winship Cancer Institute's Control and Population Science Program, and his current research interests focus on decision support for system level eScience. ------------------------------ thanks! best yanqing