Jonathan Rose from the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto will be speaking on Software-Enabled Medicine through Interdisciplinary Research
Abstract
Technology keeps evolving to have powerful influences on our daily lives and the planet. A key enabler in tech is software – its composability permits the creation of ever-more powerful frame-works that can be brought together to find solutions to major challenges (but also, unfortunately, to create some of those challenges). It will be important for “non-software” people to become more literate in what is possible now and in the future using software, so that they can both seek to ap-ply it, and perhaps understand its dangers. To that end, I have taught an inter-disciplinary software-based graduate course for the past eight years, which is open to all graduate students at my Uni-versity. I’ll describe the structure of the course and some of the interesting projects that have aris-en in medicine, psychology, music, education and other disciplines. Teaching the course caused my own research to pivot significantly, towards the ‘automation of medicine’ broadly, with a more specific focus on technology for the support of mental health. I’ll describe one or two projects in this domain, including mental-health monitoring through a smartphone, and a computer chatbot to help smokers begin the process of quitting smoking.
Biography
Jonathan Rose is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, whose long-time research dealt with the architecture, CAD and applications of FPGAs. He has recently pivoted his research towards the automation of medicine using software technologies, in-cluding machine learning, with a specific focus on the support of mental health diagnosis and therapy. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Royal So-ciety of Canada and a Foreign Member of the American National Academy of Engineering. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Canadian NGO Academics without Borders since 2012.
A reception with refreshments will be held after the talk in 460 Clyde Building.