abie is doing really exciting work at ihme. this should be a great talk! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Connie Ivey-Pasche <connie@cs.washington.edu> Date: Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 13:47 Subject: [Cs-grads] UW CSE Colloq / 10-19-10 / Flaxman / UW Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation / Computational Social Science in Medicine To: talks - Mailing List <talks@cs.washington.edu>, faculty - Mailing List <faculty@cs.washington.edu>, cs-grads - Mailing List <cs-grads@cs.washington.edu>, cs-staff - Mailing List <cs-staff@cs.washington.edu> Tuesday of next week ... UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON Computer Science and Engineering COLLOQUIUM SPEAKER: Abie Flaxman, UW Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation TITLE: Computational Social Science in Medicine DATE: Tuesday, October 19, 2010 TIME: 3:30pm PLACE: EEB-105 HOST: Anna Karlin ABSTRACT: "Medicine is a social science", this has been the mantra of public health since 1848. Today, medicine is a computational social science. In this talk, I'll give an overview of the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD), and describe some of its many algorithmic challenges. GBD is a systematic effort to produce estimates of how 200+ diseases, injuries, and risk factors impact people around the world. Naturally, there are a lot of numbers to crunch. But you may be surprised to learn how many of the relevant numbers are missing. And the numbers we do have often don't add up. This is where we need computational tools, and where we leverage research from probability theory and machine learning, as well as economics and political science. I'll give you a quick tour of the interdisciplinary area that is Health Metrics. BIO: Abraham Flaxman was trained a theoretical computer scientist in the Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization program at CMU, but has recently "changed fields", which is to say learned how interesting global health research is and how important computer science skills are in that field. He is now an Assistant Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington, and instead of approximately counting colorings of random graphs he is approximately counting mosquito nets. He blogs about the computer science challenges in global health at http://healthyalgorithms.wordpress.com Refreshments to be served in room prior to talk. *NOTE* This lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet. See http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html for more information. Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu/ (206) 543-1695 The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accomodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance of the event at: (206) 543-6450/V, (206) 543-6452/TTY, (206) 685-3885/FAX, or access@u.washington.edu.