Deborah McGuinness

Watch Webinar Video

Professor McGuinness' talk will focus on “Changing perspectives on human health enabled by precision medicine”.

“The landscape is changing as data becomes more accessible and integrated and, thus, more able to be used to understand population impacts,” she says.

An expert on ontologies (computer understandable encodings of meaning), Professor McGuinness will show why she believes this type of addition to traditional health databases is poised to significantly change the way the world can use information to revolutionize and personalize health care and health research.

Deborah's primary research thrusts include work on semantically-enabled schema and data integration, ontologies, open linked data, data science, and foundational knowledge representation and reasoning to support a wide range of informatics and analysis efforts. Prior to joining RPI, Deborah was the acting director of the Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Senior Research Scientist in the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, and previous to that she was at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Deborah is also widely known for her leading role in the development of the W3C Recommended Web Ontology Language (OWL), her work on earlier description logic languages and environments, including the CLASSIC knowledge representation system, and more recently, her work on interdisciplinary semantic data resources, provenance languages and environments, including InferenceWeb, PML, and PROV. She has built and deployed numerous ontology environments and ontology-enhanced applications, including some that have been in continuous use for over a decade at AT&T and Lucent, and two that have won deployment awards for variation reduction on plant floors and interdisciplinary virtual observatories. Recent application thrusts include health informatics and smart environmental monitoring. Some current and recent projects can be explored at http://tw.rpi.edu/web/person/Deborah_L_McGuinness/Projects. She has published over 350 peer-reviewed papers and has authored granted patents in knowledge based systems, ontology environments, configuration, and search technology.

She also consults with clients wishing to plan, develop, deploy, and maintain semantic web and/or AI applications. Some areas of recent work include: data science, next generation health advisors, ontology design and evolution environments, semantically-enabled virtual observatories, semantic integration of scientific data, context-aware mobile applications, search, eCommerce, configuration, and supply chain management. She is a frequent technology advisory board member, currently or previously with Qualcomm, OrbMedia, SocialWire, and Sandpiper Software. She also advised Applied Semantics, Guru Worldwide, and Cerebra prior to their acquisitions. Deborah has also worked as an expert witness in a number of cases, and has deposition and trial experience.

Professor McGuinness' talk will focus on changing perspectives on human health enabled by data-driven precision medicine. She will introduce the changing landscape as data becomes more accessible and integrated and thus more able to be used to understand population impacts.   Dr. McGuinness is an expert on ontologies – computer understandable encodings of meaning – and she will show why she believes this type of addition to traditional health databases is poised to significantly change the way the world can use information to revolutionize and personalize health care and health research.