Insights from Data: Navigating the Infodemic 1

Wednesday, 8 December 2021

Moderator

Philip AbdelMalik

Team Lead, World Health Organization (WHO)

Philip is an epidemiologist and public health informatician, passionate about creative and cross-disciplinary ways to enhance public health practice and capacity. With over 20 years of experience in the health domain, he currently leads and manages an interdisciplinary team within WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, building and strengthening public health intelligence around the globe. This includes the flagship Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) initiative which is a cornerstone of the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence and the initiative behind this very meeting!

Prior to joining WHO, Philip co-directed the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program and worked extensively with the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Philip’s work has almost always been in the context of emergency preparedness and response activities…including trying to raise two young (mostly adorable) children with his lovely wife from down under.

Philip holds a PhD in Public Health Informatics awarded jointly by the Universities of Plymouth and Exeter in the UK, as well as a Master of Health Science (MHSc) in Epidemiology and Community Health and an Honours BSc with a specialization in Human Biology, both from the University of Toronto, Canada.

Speakers


Pascale Fung

Professor, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Pascale Fung is a Professor at the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science & Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), and a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions towards statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”. She is an Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”. She is the Director of HKUST Centre for AI Research (CAiRE), an interdisciplinary research centre on top of all four schools at HKUST. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC). She is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute at HKUST. She is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is an expert on the Global Future Council, a think tank for the World Economic Forum. She represents HKUST on Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society. She is on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is a member of the IEEE Working Group to develop an IEEE standard - Recommended Practice for Organizational Governance of Artificial Intelligence. Her research team has won several best and outstanding paper awards at ACL, ACL and NeurIPS workshops.

Jakub Piskorski

Polish Academy of Sciences

Jakub is a computer scientist with over 20 years of experience in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which covers research, software engineering, technology transfer, project management, event organization and leading various endeavours in this field. Currently he is a Research Associate at the Polish Academy of Sciences and is consulting the Text and Data Mining Unit of the EC Joint Research Centre on efficient multilingual application-oriented NLP solutions with a focus on Information Extraction from online sources. Previously he held a post of a Senior Research Officer in the R&D Unit of the EU border agency Frontex, working mainly on open source intelligence. Prior to this, he worked as a Research Fellow at EC Joint Research Centre in the Global Security Unit on AI-based media monitoring solutions, a Senior Software Engineer and Researcher at the Language Technology Lab of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbruecken (Germany), and a Lecturer at the Department of Information Systems at the Poznań University of Economics. Jakub holds M.Sc in Computer Science and Computational Linguistics from the Saarland University (Germany) and PhD from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. He loves to convert research results into real-world text processing applications.

Jonathan Anthony

Software Architect and Founder, Adappt AI

Jon is the Founder of several companies including Adappt.ai and TheHub.ai
Jon is the software architect behind several key WHO health platforms including EIS (Event Information System), GOARN (Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network), the World Malaria Program, HIV, Cholera and TB mobile apps, EIOS GPSYS Covid government data extraction AI platform and the forthcoming EIOS AI Anomaly Detection Media Monitoring module.
Jon was also the architect behind several global commercial legal platforms including The HUB AI regulatory monitoring platform, Lexis Nexis Create AI based legal assistant, The British Museum Stolen Artifacts Monitoring platform, and has recently been recognized with an award from the UK Home Office for an innovative approach to linguistic analysis of crime data.
When not coding, Jon can usually be found rock climbing.

Christine Czerniak

Communications Expert, Communications Expert

Chris is working to advance the science of infodemiology, and innovate new tools and techniques for infodemic managers to better understand and respond to evolving community concerns for public health. A key focus is building capacities for infodemic management as a core part of national and international health emergency preparedness and response planning. Before joining WHO, she advised UN organizations, government agencies, biotechnology companies, and non-governmental organizations on issues relating to global health, food security, equality, and other development goals.