Cloud Computing for Healthcare

Professor Paul Watson

Hosted by Horizon

Paul Watson is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Digital Institute at Newcastle University. He also directs the £12M RCUK-funded Digital Economy Hub on Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy and Co-Directs the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cloud Computing for Big Data. In the 80s, as a Lecturer at Manchester University, he was a designer of the Alvey Flagship and Esprit EDS systems. From 1990-5 he worked for ICL as a system designer of the Goldrush MegaServer parallel database server, which was released as a product in 1994. His research interest is in scalable information management, with a current focus on Cloud Computing. Professor Watson is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee. He received the 2014 Jim Gray eScience Award.

Abstract

Cloud Computing has the potential to revolutionise healthcare. The expansion of wireless internet, coupled with a massive growth in cheap, mobile sensors offers opportunities to deliver personalised, high-quality healthcare cheaply to people in their own homes. Clouds have an important role to play in realising this potential, as it requires the ability to store and analyse the vast amounts of data that these sensors collect. This presents both problems and opportunities: new scalable, parallel algorithms and platforms are needed to analyse the sensor data, while there are important advantages to be gained by combining the data from a population of users in order to better understand medical conditions and how best to treat them.

The talk will be illustrated with examples from our projects in this area, including the use of sensors to understand older people's activity in order to provide personalised treatment; and also on the analysis of gaming data to help people recover from strokes.

This guest lecture will be followed by hot drinks and cakes outside LT2.