Ramesh Jain

Role: Invited Speaker
Affiliation: University of California, Irvine

Biography:

Ramesh is a Donald Bren Professor in Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine. His current research is in Objective Self and Future Health. He is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, IEEE, IAPR, and SPIE. Ramesh co-founded several companies, managed them in initial stages, and then turned them over to professional management. He also advised major companies in multimedia and search technology. He still enjoys the thrill of start-up environment.His research and entrepreneurial interests have been in computer vision, AI, multimedia, and social computing. He is the founding director of Institute for Future Health at UCI.

Abstract:

Health is a continuous state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. A person’s health is the result of genetics, lifestyle, environment, and socio-economic situation. Though health is a continuous state, resource limitations resulted in considering health as reactive and episodic aspect of life. Availability of technology and resources suggests that our perspective on health should be adjusted to reflect reality. Advances in smart phones, sensors, and wearable technology are now making it possible to analyze and understand an individual’s lifestyle from mostly passively collected objective data streams to build her model and predict important health events in her life. Availability of massive processing power suggests that cybernetic approach may help people manage lifestyle and environment for many chronic conditions, such as Diabetes. Three major components in building such cybernetic systems are: building personal model, using diverse observations for estimating current health state, and guiding people through lifestyle and environment for best results. Institute for Future Health at UCI is exploring these approaches. We will present our approach to developing such health navigators for helping people in getting to desirable health states.