BRIDGE Webinar with Nathaniel Osgood
Dynamic Health Policy Modeling in the Age of Big Data
Nathaniel Osgood
Professor, Dept of Computer Science & Associate Faculty, Dept of Community Health & Epidemiology at University of Saskatchewan
Among his many data science contributions, Dr. Osgood is the co-creator of two novel mobile sensor-based epidemiological monitoring systems.
Abstract
Traditional health science methods have secured great advances in the duration and quality of life. Unfortunately, a troubling crop of complex health challenges confront Canada and the world, and threaten to stop – and even reverse the – rise in length and quality of life that many take for granted. Within this talk, I provide a glimpse of the promise afforded by combining Data Science, Systems Science and Computational Science, particularly by using machine learning to cross-link dynamic decision-oriented models with “big data” offering high volume, velocity, variety and veracity. We particularly highlight the increasing accessibility of insights secured from mobile devices to study health behavior of consenting individuals via cross-linked sensor data and on-device self-reporting, absent the need for custom programming. Contemporary tools in this area offer strong advantages for population sciences, in supporting understanding of behaviour where accurate self-reporting is difficult, exposures to environments and contact patterns, in providing a mean of in-situ assessment of knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, and in understanding the effects of interventions across multiple pathways. Machine learning techniques can be used to link such high-velocity data with decision-oriented models in a fashion that permits recurrent model regrounding, thereby allowing the models to knit together an evolving holistic portrait of even latent areas of the system, project forward likely system evolution, and to be used for grounded investigation of tradeoffs between intervention strategies.
About the speaker
Nathaniel Osgood serves as Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Associate Faculty in the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan. His research as director of the Computational Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics Laboratory is focused on providing cross-linked simulation, data science, and machine learning tools to inform understanding of population health trends and health policy tradeoffs. Among his many data science contributions, Dr. Osgood is the co-creator of two novel mobile sensor-based epidemiological monitoring systems, most recently the 4th generation Google Android- and iPhone-based iEpi (now Ethica Health) platform, which has been used in over 100 studies worldwide and is available in 9 languages. Dr. Osgood serves as Chief Research Advisor on the Saskatchewan Centre for Patient Oriented Research, is the lead technical architect for the cross-sectoral Saskatchewan Police Policing Analytics Laboratory, and has guided analytics that have shaped important policy and investment decisions at the Saskatchewan at the Ministry of Health. Dr. Osgood has led dozens of international courses in simulation modeling and health around the world, and his online videos on the subject have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, and thousands of followers. Prior to joining the U of S faculty, he graduated from MIT with a PhD in Computer Science in 1999, served as a Senior Lecturer and Research Associate at MIT and worked for a number of years in a variety of academic, consulting and industry positions.
