Alain April

Role: Senior Programme Committee
Affiliation: ETS, Montreal, Canada

Dr. April is currently Professor and director of the Software Engineering master program at the ETS Engineering University, Montreal, Canada. He is a member of ISO/SC38 ‘Cloud Computing committee’ and JTC1/WG9 ISO committee on BigData. He has chaired the Software Engineering department at ETS and in 2011 received the ISO award for higher education in standardization.

Professor April teaches, promotes and encourages the contribution of his students to UC Berkeley’s amplab BDAS and ADAM open-source projects applied to digital health.

Alain’s research into BigData related to healthcare involves mainly machine learning, data mining and fast and scalable DNA processing and analysis based on the recent advances of UC Berkeley’s ADAM technology. His current initiatives includes:

1) BGX, a centralized health research database that integrates clinical, animal, biochemistry and especially genomic data for the health researcher of small and medium research labs;

2) PACIQ, A dashboard software to monitor the continuous improvement and quality program for health accreditation (i.e. Accreditation Canada, BOMA BESt, Planetree and Quebec Network of Heath Promoting institutions);

3) GOAT, an open-source BigData Genetic Output Analysis Tool allowing the interactive exploration of a Manhattan graph zooming into a chromosome are a of interest;

4) CorlabNow, a real-time dashboard that allows close tracking of critical troponin tests in a high-throughput diagnostic medicine core laboratory which typically processes thousands of patient tests results per hour in large hospitals; and

5) Endomine, a data mining software using blood test, pharmacy and genomics data for endocrinology, metabolism and clinical epidemilogy research.