José Luis Oliveira
Associate Professor in Computer Science
DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro (PT)
Introduce yourself and your institution?
I’m associate professor at the Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics of the University of Aveiro (UAVR), Portugal. I’m also co-founder of BMD Software, an SME-dedicated to the development of medical imaging solutions, biomedical applications, and knowledge extraction in health and life science industries. My research interests are related to translational applications in biomedicine, specifically text mining, information retrieval, distributed systems and computational methods.
As a PI or co-investigator, I participated in more than twenty international projects, such as (most recently), RD-CONNECT (FP7), EMIF (IMI), HEMOSPEC (FP7), EUROLEISH-NET (H2020/ITN), MedBioinformatics (H2020) and EHDEN (IMI2, see http://emif-catalogue.eu). Through these projects we made many distinct contributions to the open source community, including OHDSI tools, software development, and biomedical data integration. The biomedical tools resulting from this collaborative effort are publicly available at http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/software/ or at https://github.com/bioinformatics-ua.
What is your role in EHDEN and what do you personally hope to get out of this role?
In EHDEN we are responsible for the development of the EHDEN Portal and for the integration of tools that are being developed or adopted by the project. For instance, we are including in this ecosystem the Data Catalogue to expose metadata and global characteristics of each database, and the Data Network, where one can visualise several dashboards representing aggregated analyses of CDM databases.
The success of this effort will largely depend on the continuous guidance and validation from the end-users and all the project participants. Personally, I would be very gratified if at the project’s conclusion our outcomes are widely recognised and adopted.
What would you consider success at the end of EHDEN?
An overall performance aligned with, or even above, the proposed indicators would be great! For me, a major success for EHDEN would be changing mindsets and removing many of the existing barriers that are caused by legal-ethical issues, and that are currently hindering access to health data for research purposes.