Guest Lecture: Timothy Chou
November 03, 2021
6:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. CAT
Virtual
A digital future for children’s healthcare in Africa
Abstract: In 2020, we launched a project with the mission to connect all 1,000,000 healthcare machines in all the children's hospitals in the world to create a digital infrastructure to transform children's healthcare globally. Nowhere is this more important than Africa, where diseases like pneumonia still claim many lives and lack of healthcare machine maintenance results in equipment graveyards. In Africa, the average age is 19 years old and rapidly getting younger. The continent is growing so quickly that by halfway through this century, it will be home to one billion children. By 2050, two in every five children in the world will be born here. Attempting to replicate a first-world solution by building medical schools and hospitals is impossible. Can digital technology make a difference? AI and machine learning in medicine hold much promise, but there are three fundamental challenges: Where do you get the data to feed the development of neural networks; How do you learn on this data while both preserving privacy and network bandwidth? And finally, when you develop an algorithm, how do you deploy it to the field? An answer to all three questions is to deploy servers to the edge connected to the healthcare machines (which have all the data). We've engineered an edge cloud service, which provides managed compute, storage, data, networking, and application services. Like center cloud services (AWS, GCP, Azure) the security, availability, performance and change are managed and like the center cloud instances are provided in an on-demand business model. Unlike the center cloud the edge cloud is distributed to millions of data centers vs. the 10 or so data centers that house center cloud servers. This seminar will both introduce the edge cloud service as well as share the application of the technology to researchers, clinicians and clinical engineers. We think the edge cloud has a unique role to play in the future of children’s healthcare in Africa and look forward to the discussion.
Bio: A little over seven years ago, Dr. Timothy Chou came to the CMU-Africa campus and delivered a lecture on cloud computing. He’s widely recognized as a leader in the field since he was the first President of Oracle’s cloud computing business, authored the landmark book “The End of Software”, and started the first class on cloud computing at Stanford University. One of his students, a pediatric cardiologist earning a degree in bioinformatics inspired this moonshot project.
Host: Timothy X. Brown
For more information on this event, contact Pamella Mbabazi:
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