Abraham Flaxman to Discuss Disease Study at CS+X Colloquium

The largest and most comprehensive effort to measure health trends worldwide, the Global Burden of Disease Study has generated a massive amount of data about disease, injuries, and risk factors.

As a part of Northwestern Engineering’s CS+X colloquium series, Abraham Flaxman, a mathematician and computer scientist from the University of Washington, will explore the big data output that resulted from this study. He will highlight some of the study’s findings and discuss the methods and data that are essential to a study of this size, a collaboration of 488 researchers from 303 institutions across 50 countries.

“The Computer Science of Disease Burden Measurement” will take place at 2 p.m. Monday, March 28 in the ITW Classroom of the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center.

Flaxman leads the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) computational algorithms research team. He is the primary architect of a software tool called DisMod-MR that IHME uses to estimate the Global Burden of Disease. His team uses the tool to correct inconsistencies and to fill in incomplete data for stroke, malaria, depression, and other diseases from government records and surveys.

Hosted by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the CS+X Colloquium Series defines challenges and opportunities for both computer science and other disciplines as the scope and nature of computational thinking continue to evolve.