Keynote

Kerstin Denecke, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland

Keynote Title: “TBA”

Kerstin Denecke (Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland) received the Doctoral degree in computer sciences from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. Since 2015 is full professor of medical informatics at the Bern University of Applied Sciences. Her research interests include medical language processing, artificial intelligence, conversational agents and participatory health informatics and sentiment analysis. Currently, she is leading projects related to sentiment analysis from clinical documents, information extraction from radiology reports and automatic validation of LLM-generated text.

Yulan He, Kings College London

Keynote Title: “Advancements in Pharmacovigilance with Large Language Models”

Yulan He is a Professor in Natural Language Processing at the Department of Informatics in King’s College London, UK. She directs the NLP group there (https://kclnlp.github.io). Yulan obtained her PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. She is currently holding a prestigious 5-year UKRI Turing AI Fellowship. Yulan’s research interests lie in the integration of machine learning and natural language processing for text understanding. Recently, she has focused on addressing the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to enhance their reasoning capabilities, robustness, and explainability. She has published over 250 papers on topics such as machine reading comprehension, model interpretability and trustworthy AI, NLP for health, finance and education. She has received several prizes and awards for her research, including a SWSA Ten-Year Award, a CIKM Test-of-Time Award, and AI 2020 Most Influential Scholar Honourable Mention. She served as the General Chair for AACL-IJCNLP 2022 and a Program Co-Chair for various conferences such as ECIR 2024, CCL 2024, and EMNLP 2020. Her research has received support from the EPSRC, Royal Academy of Engineering, EU-H2020, Innovate UK, British Council, and industrial funding.

Daniel Elson, Imperial College London

Tentative Keynote Title: “AI for Surgical Imaging”

Daniel Elson is a Professor of Surgical Imaging and Biophotonics in the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Institute of Global Health Innovation and Department of Surgery and Cancer at St. Mary’s Hospital. Research interests are based around the development and application of photonics technology to medical imaging, including multispectral imaging, near infrared fluorescence, structured lighting, light sources in endoscopy and diffuse and fluorescence spectroscopy.

Elvira Perez Vallejos, University of Nottingham & RAI UK

Keynote Title: “TBA”

Professor Elvira Perez Vallejos is Professor of Digital Technology for Mental Health and Digital Technologies at Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre Mental Health and Technology theme (Division of Psychiatry and Applied Psychology, Faculty of Medicine). She is interested on the ethical challenges embedded in digital solutions for mental health including the widespread of machine learning/AI methods on the development of new mental health interventions. She has experience on RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) and Data Ethics as well as on Data Privacy, Online Consent, User-centric design, Creative Practices for Mutual Recovery, Experimental Psychology, Participatory research, Children and Young People, and Older Adults.

John Gallacher, University of Oxford

Keynote Title: “TBA”

John Gallacher is Professor of Cognitive Health at Oxford University. An expert on brain health and the use of big data in medical research, Professor Gallacher holds a visiting professorship at Imperial College London and an honorary professorship at the University of Hong Kong. He is the Principal Investigator for the Caerphilly Prospective Study (CaPS). Professor Gallacher is the director of Dementias Platform UK and the director of Brainwaves Study of Adolescent Wellbeing and Mental Health.

Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) is a public-private partnership with core funding from the Medical Research Council aimed at speeding up progress in dementia research. Based at Oxford University, DPUK brings together expertise from universities, charities, and pharmaceutical and technology companies in a high-trust, collaborative environment. DPUK gives scientists access to the latest data, technologies and research opportunities to help bridge the gap between fundamental discoveries in the lab and successful trials of new treatments for dementia. Find out more by visiting https://www.dementiasplatform.uk.

BrainWaves is a new global mental wellbeing initiative for young people, being developed in the UK and led by Oxford. Working with schools and young people, Brainwaves is investigating the determinants of positive wellbeing, and poor mental health. Working with the University of Swansea, BrainWaves is creating a new research platform that will conduct a large cohort study with nested trials delivery. Working with The Day, BrainWaves is developing evidence based educational materials for use in schools. Find out more by visiting https://brainwaveshub.org/