Keynote
Speech: "What a great time to be alive"
Steve Akers (Met ’94) earned his Master of Science in Computer Science degree from BU Metropolitan College and is a member of the Dean of Metropolitan College’s advisory board. He was also appointed to the position of “Entrepreneur in Residence” at Metropolitan College where he has provided insights to faculty and students at MET, giving lectures and advice when they are requested. Since studying at BU MET college, Steve has co-founded or founded four different companies, leveraging the knowledge he gained at MET to augment his entrepreneurial talents. He attributes his time at MET as a positive building block that has helped him lead his teams and companies to build award-winning products of commercial value. Prior to his start-up career, Steve held engineering and senior executive positions at Hewlett-Packard Co., and various Boston-area computer companies. In these roles he contributed to several technology areas, including networking protocols, secure communications, and data encryption. His first startup, Spring Tide Networks, Inc., was acquired by Lucent Technologies (now Nokia) where Steve served as Chief Technology Officer. One of his duties in that role was to chair the Architecture Council, a consortium of Bell Laboratories executives and senior research fellows. The purpose of the Architecture Council was to bring researchers together with engineering and business executives within Lucent. While leading the Architecture Council, Steve identified and led initiatives to bring cutting-edge research developed by Bell Labs into products sold by the Lucent operating companies. Under Steve’s direction, Spring Tide Networks built the world’s first Internet switching and routing platform that allowed service providers to instantiate high-capacity data, voice and firewall security services, including Virtual Private Networks. The Spring Tide “IP Services Switch” was one of the first highly capable platforms augmented with data encryption services. One customer, IBM, used the Spring Tide technology to build a secure private network linking many of its sites over fully encrypted high speed data lines. Another of Mr. Akers’ companies worked closely with Bloomberg Inc. and provided data insight services for highly sensitive financial documents and messages. Bloomberg acquired that company and over five years Steve ran teams in Boston and New York to provide data analytics services to aid Bloomberg businesses serving some of the largest banks and investment firms in the world. Steve is now the President and CEO of MaxCogito, Inc., a company he founded to build products that leverage blockchain and other technologies utilizing next-generation cryptography. Products from MaxCogito protect data and sensitive communications between counterparties to financial transactions, as well as protecting data in cloud and enterprise environments.
Abstract
How can we create technologies to help us reflect on and potentially change our behavior, as well as improve our health and overall wellbeing both at work and at home? In this talk, I will briefly describe the last several years of work our research team has been doing in this area. We have developed wearable technology to help families manage tense situations with their children, mobile phone-based applications for handling stress and depression, as well as automatic stress sensing systems plus interventions to help users just in time. The overarching goal in all of this research is to develop intelligent systems that work with and adapt to the user so that they can maximize their personal health goals and improve their wellbeing.
Steve Akers
MaxCogito, Inc.
Nicos Maglaveras
Professor of Medical Informatics Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece
Personalised health driven by digital health systems and multi-source health/environmental data, ML/AI/DL analytics and predictive models
Nicos Maglaveras received the diploma in electrical engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th.), Greece, in 1982, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering with an emphasis in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He is currently a Professor of Medical Informatics, A.U.Th. He served as head of the graduate program in medical informatics at A.U.Th, as Visiting Professor at Northwestern University Dept of EECS (2016-2019), and is a collaborating researcher with the Center of Research and Technology Hellas, and the National Hellenic Research Foundation.
His current research interests include biomedical engineering, biomedical informatics, ehealth, AAL, personalised health, biosignal analysis, medical imaging, and neurosciences. He has published more than 500 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, books and conference proceedings out of which over 160 as full peer review papers in indexed international journals. He has developed graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of (bio)medical informatics, biomedical signal processing, personal health systems, physiology and biological systems simulation.
He has served as a Reviewer in CEC AIM, ICT and DGRT D-HEALTH technical reviews and as reviewer, associate editor and editorial board member in more than 20 international journals, and participated as Coordinator or Core Partner in over 45 national and EU and US funded competitive research projects attracting more than 16 MEUROs in funding. He has served as president of the EAMBES in 2008-2010. Dr. Maglaveras has been a member of the IEEE, AMIA, the Greek Technical Chamber, the New York Academy of Sciences, the CEN/TC251, Eta Kappa Nu and an EAMBES Fellow.
Abstract
The last years saw a steep increase in the number of wearable sensors and systems, mhealth and uhealth apps both in the clinical settings and in everyday life. Further large amounts of data both in the clinical settings (imaging, biochemical, medication, electronic health records, -omics), in the community (behavioral, social media, mental state, genetic tests, wearable driven bio-parameters and biosignals) as well as environmental stressors and data (air quality, water pollution etc.) have been produced, and made available to the scientific and medical community, powering the new AI/DL/ML based analytics for the identification of new digital biomarkers leading to new diagnostic pathways, updated clinical and treatment guidelines, and a better and more intuitive interaction medium between the citizen and the health care system.
Thus, the concept of connected and translational health has started evolving steadily, connecting pervasive health systems, using new predictive models, new approaches in biological systems modeling and simulation, as well as fusing data and information from different pipelines for more efficient diagnosis and disease management.
In this talk, we will present the current state-of-the-art in personalized health care by presenting cases from COVID-19 and COPD patients using advanced wearable vests and new technology sensors including lung sound and EIT, new outcome prediction models in COVID-19 ICU patients fusing X-Rays, lung sounds, and ICU parameters transformed via AI/ML/DL pipelines, new approaches fusing environmental stressors with -omics analytics for chronic disease management, and finally new ML/AI-driven methodologies for predicting mental health diseases including suicidality, anxiety, and depression.
