Abstract | Semantic approaches for biomedical knowledge integration and discovery
With its focus on investigating the basis for the sustained existence of living systems, modern biology has always been a fertile, if not challenging, domain for knowledge management and discovery. Yet the existence of millions of scientific articles, thousands of databases, and hundreds of ontologies, offers an exciting opportunity to reuse our collective knowledge, were it not stymied by incompatible formats, partial and overlapping standards, and heterogeneous data access.

In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to use a variety of knowledge representation and data mining technologies to wrangle biomedical knowledge into simple, but effective representations in order to generate and test hypotheses concerning drug repositioning and drug safety. As increased pressure mounts from researchers, publishers, and funders to provide FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable) data, researchers worldwide need to be strategically poised to use these representations to pursue increasingly sophisticated discovery towards understanding human health and disease.

About
Dr. Michel Dumontier is a world-renowned researcher in the field of data science. After his work at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University, he started as Distinguished Professor of Data Science at Maastricht University in January 2017.

His research focuses on the development of computational methods to increase the understanding of how living systems respond to chemical agents and how this response changes with genetic and environmental conditions.

Moreover, he advances the development of semantic web technologies to facilitate the investigation as well as the publishing and sharing of the vast amounts of biomedical data and knowledge.

About
Professor Burrage completed his PhD in Computational Mathematics from the University of Auckland in 1978. In his early academic years he was at the University of Auckland (NZ), the University of Sussex (UK), the University of Liverpool (UK). In 1991 he was appointed to the Chair of Computational Mathematics the University of Queensland. He established the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre at the University of Queensland in 1995 and was Director of that centre for 12 years. He was also the founding CEO of the Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Facility in 1999. He was awarded a Federation Fellowship of the Australian Research Council from 2003-2008. In 2008 he was made Professor of Computational Systems Biology in the Computational Biology group within both the Department of Computer Science and the Centre for Integrative Systems Biology at the University of Oxford. He had this position until October 2015. He shared his time between Oxford and as as Professor of Computational Mathematics at QUT, from 2010 until 2015. He continues in his role at QUT. He was made a Visiting Professor to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford from 2016. His current research interests are in Computational Science and Computational Biology.

Professor Burrage has made very significant contributions in Computational Mathematics and Computational Systems Biology. He has co-authored over 200 research papers and has written one book on Parallel and Sequential methods for Ordinary Differential Equations (OUP 1995). In the last ten years he has made very significant contributions in the field of Computational and Systems Biology (with a focus on the role of noise in Biological systems in his Federation Fellowship). In this setting Professor Burrage has addressed challenging problems in genetic regulation and cellular kinetics through sophisticated stochastic multi-scaled modelling and simulation incorporating intrinsic and extrinsic noise.

About
Prof. Dr. Piet van der Graaf is a Professor of Systems Pharmacology and Chair of Pharmacology at Leiden University.

He is also Vice President and Head of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology at Certara and Editor-in-Chief of Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology.

He has 15 years of experience of working in the pharmaceutical industry at Synthélabo (Sanofi) and Pfizer, where he held leadership positions in Discovery Biology, Pharmacokinetics & Drug Metabolism (PDM) and Clinical Pharmacology/Pharmacometrics.