Debates from CHIL 2023

Bio: Dr. Chute is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics, Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing at Johns Hopkins University, and Chief Research Information Officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. He is also Section Head of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science and Deputy Director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. He received his undergraduate and medical training at Brown University, internal medicine residency at Dartmouth, and doctoral training in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Clinical Informatics, and an elected Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Epidemiology, HL7, the American Medical Informatics Association, and the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), as well as a Founding Fellow of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics; he was president of ACMI 2017-18. He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians. His career has focused on how we can represent clinical information to support analyses and inferencing, including comparative effectiveness analyses, decision support, best evidence discovery, and translational research. He has had a deep interest in the semantic consistency of health data, harmonized information models, and ontology. His current research focuses on translating basic science information to clinical practice, how we classify dysfunctional phenotypes (disease), and the harmonization and rendering of real-world clinical data including electronic health records to support data inferencing. He became founding Chair of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic in 1988, retiring from Mayo in 2014, where he remains an emeritus Professor of Biomedical Informatics. He is presently PI on a spectrum of high-profile informatics grants from NIH spanning translational science including co-lead on the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). He has been active on many HIT standards efforts and chaired ISO Technical Committee 215 on Health Informatics and chaired the World Health Organization (WHO) International Classification of Disease Revision (ICD-11).

Bio: Robert Platt is Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, and of Pediatrics, at McGill University. He holds the Albert Boehringer I endowed chair in Pharmacoepidemiology, and is Principal Investigator of the Canadian Network for Observational Drug Effect Studies (CNODES). His research focuses on improving statistical methods for the study of medications using administrative data, with a substantive focus on medications in pregnancy. Dr. Platt is an editor-in-chief of Statistics in Medicine and is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Epidemiology and Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. He has published over 400 articles, one book and several book chapters on biostatistics and epidemiology.

Bio: Tianxi Cai is John Rock Professor of Translational Data Science at Harvard, with joint appointments in the Biostatistics Department and the Department of Biomedical Informatics. She directs the Translational Data Science Center for a Learning Health System at Harvard Medical School and co-directs the Applied Bioinformatics Core at VA MAVERIC. She is a major player in developing analytical tools for mining multi-institutional EHR data, real world evidence, and predictive modeling with large scale biomedical data. Tianxi received her Doctor of Science in Biostatistics at Harvard and was an assistant professor at the University of Washington before returning to Harvard as a faculty member in 2002.

Bio: Dr. Yong Chen is Professor of Biostatistics at the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). He directs a Computing, Inference and Learning Lab at University of Pennsylvania, which focuses on integrating fundamental principles and wisdoms of statistics into quantitative methods for tackling key challenges in modern biomedical data. Dr. Chen is an expert in synthesis of evidence from multiple data sources, including systematic review and meta-analysis, distributed algorithms, and data integration, with applications to comparative effectiveness studies, health policy, and precision medicine. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers in a wide spectrum of methodological and clinical areas. During the pandemic, Dr. Chen is serving as Director of Biostatistics Core for Pedatric PASC of the RECOVER COVID initiative which a national multi-center RWD-based study on Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC), involving more than 13 million patients across more than 10 health systems. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Medical Informatics Association, Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, and Elected Member of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.

Bio: Dr. Khaled El Emam is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Medical AI at the University of Ottawa, where he is a Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health. He is also a Senior Scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute and Director of the multi-disciplinary Electronic Health Information Laboratory, conducting research on privacy enhancing technologies to enable the sharing of health data for secondary purposes, including synthetic data generation and de-identification methods. Khaled is a co-founder of Replica Analytics, a company that develops synthetic data generation technology, which was recently acquired by Aetion. As an entrepreneur, Khaled founded or co-founded six product and services companies involved with data management and data analytics, with some having successful exits. Prior to his academic roles, he was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada. He also served as the head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. He participates in a number of committees, number of the European Medicines Agency Technical Anonymization Group, the Panel on Research Ethics advising on the TCPS, the Strategic Advisory Council of the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and also is co-editor-in-chief of the JMIR AI journal. In 2003 and 2004, he was ranked as the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software based on his research on measurement and quality evaluation and improvement. He held the Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa from 2005 to 2015. Khaled has a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Electronics.

Bio: Li Xiong is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University. She held a Winship Distinguished Research Professorship from 2015-2018. She has a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MS from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS from the University of Science and Technology of China. She and her research lab, Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS), conduct research on algorithms and methods at the intersection of data management, machine learning, and data privacy and security, with a recent focus on privacy-enhancing and robust machine learning. She has published over 170 papers and received six best paper or runner up awards. She has served and serves as associate editor for IEEE TKDE, IEEE TDSC, and VLDBJ, general co-chair for ACM CIKM 2022, program co-chair for IEEE BigData 2020 and ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018, 2020, program vice-chair for ACM SIGMOD 2024, 2022, and IEEE ICDE 2023, 2020, and VLDB Sponsorship Ambassador. Her research is supported by federal agencies including NSF, NIH, AFOSR, PCORI, and industry awards including Google, IBM, Cisco, AT&T, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is an IEEE felllow.