Speaker: Dr. Saeed Samet - School of Computer Science
Title: Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Health Informatics

Abstract:
Since its emergence in the 1950s and 1960s, Health Informatics (HI) has become a hot and challenging interdisciplinary field in all three pillars of medical care, education, and research. With the advent of the Internet, supercomputers, cloud computing, smartphones, and many other technological innovations that have made their way into our everyday lives, HI has become an even more complex and multifaceted field and will only continue to grow with future advancements. Therefore, it will not only attract more health professions, but will also continue to appeal to scientists and researchers from a variety of other disciplines to make itself more enriched, with the ultimate goal of directly improving people’s quality of life in an equitable and cost-effective fashion, as well as to increase health literacy and consumer education. On its way to reach these objectives, HI is facing many challenges, including, but not limited to, storing, and linking health data, converting health data to information and knowledge for decision support systems, data privacy and security, ethical concerns, cost of adopting technologies, lack of knowledge and education about new technologies and available tools, and many more. In this talk, Dr. Samet will briefly go through some of the privacy challenges in HI, followed by a review of his previous and current research in this multidisciplinary field.