International Conference on Biomedical Ontology 17

Keynote Speakers Announced!

The keynote speakers for ICBO17 will be Dr James Malone, CEO of FactBio, and Professor Alan Rector, from the University of Manchester.

 

Dr James Malone:

James has been heavily involved in many areas of bioinformatics through his roles in the academic and commercial sector. While at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) as a Lead Ontologist he developed the EBI’s EFO (Experimental Ontology Factor) to promote the reuse of standardised ontologies for expression data, which was later adopted widely across the institute and by the Open Targets platform. He has also been involved in developing many public reference ontologies such as the Orphanet Rare Disease Ontology (ORDO), Software Ontology (SWO), Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), and Cell Line Ontology (CLO). James led early work to publish RDF versions of Gene Expression databases, and was later involved in what became the EBI’s RDF Platform.
 
Alongside this, James has been heavily involved in the community, having helped establish UKON (UK Ontology Network) and delivered many training courses on bioinformatics. As CEO of FactBio, James has developed Kusp, a data annotation and curation platform, which is now being used internationally to improve data curation to international community standards across commercial and clinical organisations. He is a strong advocate for curators.
 
 

Professor Alan Rector - from the University of Manchester website:

Alan Rector is Professor of Medical Informatics in the School of Computer Science at University of Manchester. He received his BA in Philosophy and Mathematics from Pomona College, his medical training at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota where he obtained his MD, and his PhD in Medical Informatics from the University of Manchester.

Over the past twenty-five years he has led a series of projects on clinical decision support, medical records, and medical terminology including the ground breaking PEN&PAD project on intelligent medical records sponsored jointly by the UK Medical Research Council and Department of Health. More recently, he has been involved in the ICD-11 effort, and the efforts harmonise a common ontology for ICD-11 with SNOMED CT. The topic of his talk is catalysed by the experience, although it won't go into the project itself in detail.

In 2003, Professor Rector was awarded the first British Computer Society Health Informatics Committee award for lifetime service to Health Informatics.

Last modified: Wed, 09 Aug 2017 16:41:17 BST