A “big data oriented” and “complex network based” model supporting the uniform investigation of heterogeneous personalized medicine data

Abstract

In the big data era, the number, the volume and the variety of available data sources are dramatically increasing. This becomes a great issue in all the research fields. Personalized medicine does not escape this trend. However, as generally happens, what is a problem, if solved, can become an opportunity. As a consequence, if we were able to define a model capable of uniformly representing and handling data coming from disparate contexts of medicine, we could use it to face different problems in this scenario, and a concept and/or an approach designed to solve an open problem in one of these contexts could be transposed to address open issues in several others. In this presentation, we propose a complex network based model and a set of associated parameters, and we apply them to investigate three neurological disorders, namely Alzheimer’s Disease, Childhood Absence Epilepsy and Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease.

Keynote Speaker

 Domenico Ursino received the PhD in System Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Calabria in January 2000. He was an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor at University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, where he was also a Vice Rector, Responsible for Information Systems and Technology. Currently he is a Full Professor at Polytechnic University of Marche. His main research interest regards Network Analysis and its application to extract knowledge from heterogeneous application contexts, such as Biomedical Engineering, Data Lakes, Innovation Management and Internet of Things. Furthermore, he performed research activities also in Data Reconciliation and Integration, Multi-Agent Systems, Recommender Systems, Folksonomies. He is an author of more than 180 papers published in prestigious international journals and conference proceedings. He was tutor of four PhD students (Giorgio Terracina, Jameson Mbale, Pasquale De Meo and Giovanni Quattrone), who are now Professors. He was the coordinator of several projects and was a component of many other ones. He won the award for the best student paper ad ADBIS’99. His PhD thesis entitled “Semi-automatic approaches and tools for the extraction and the exploitation of intensional knowledge from heterogeneous information sources” was published as a monography in Lecture Notes in Computer Science – Springer. He served as Referee for most prestigious international journals and conferences. He founded and directed the first Italian academic coworking laboratory (“Barbiana 2.0”) and is a co-founder of the second one (“Daisy”). Finally, two of the prototypes realized by him and his colleagues (i.e., DIKE and XIKE) were acquired by important companies.