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Healthy Life Extension Society (HEALES) has pledged commitment towards providing access to health information relevant for healthy living and human longevity through its just concluded conference on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Healthy Longevity.
Speaking at the conference, Agbolade Omowole, convener of Nigeria ICT Fest and executive director of Longevity Nigeria
emphasized the need to have data ethics oversight as African countries leverage citizens’ health data for research and development. In his words “researchers who are leveraging AI and Big Data to improve healthcare should focus on increasing accessibility and reducing inequalities in healthcare delivery.”
Another speaker, Ben Goertzel, AI pioneer behind the world’s first robot citizen, Sophia, said that we don’t currently have lots of human biodata repository in the world. The situation right now is that we have human’s biodata locked in hospitals and pharmaceutical company’s database doing nothing. It is not a technology problem but a resource allocation problem.
Thierry Geerts, country director, Google Belgium and Luxembourg spoke on the topic – Homo Digitalis: how digitization is making us more human at the event.
Didier Couernell, Co-chair of HEALES on his part, emphasized the need to contribute to create a system that is trusted by citizens, managed by a public institution (or an NGO), where, by default (opt-out), all health data (anonymized or psuedonymized) can be used for scientific research (and not for other use)… to enable everyone to live a longer and healthier life.
Other notable speakers at the conference include Ilia Stambler, Stefan Sogner, Y H Taguchi, Karen Sandler, Giovanni Briganti, and Carina Dantras.
