On Feb. 15th Prof. Paulo Lisboa, from Liverpool John Moores University, gave a talk at the conference room of Faculty of Pharmacy in University of Valencia, invited by IDAL members under the Master on Ecology in the aforementioned university. The subject of the talk was Knowledge Discovery. Data are often collected or a specific purpose, for instance classification. However a full understanding of the data set requires more than just a benchmark of classifiers. The talk introduced data from an observational longitudinal cohort study to explain how to define risk stratification for time-to-event data, coninuing with automatic rule generation to explain the strata and ending with an integrated interface that adds also a domain-specific visualization of the complete database. Knowledge discovery is applicable to many different fields, as it hans bee shown in the talk. Among other case studies, the prediction of the ecological status of human-altered streams and its rule-based interpretation was introduced.

Paulo Lisboa is Professor in Industrial Mathematics at Liverpool John Moores University. His main research interests are in applications of neural networks mainly to medical decision support and in computational marketing, although other fields of knowledge have also been tackled. He leads collaborative research nationally and internationally, including the cancer track for the FP6 Network of Excellence Biopattern. He has over 170 refereed publications and 4 edited books. Since 2001 his research has generated external funding of c. £1m from the Research Councils, European Commission and industrial contracts. He holds cross-Faculty positions as chair of the executive committee of the Centre for Health and Social Care Informatics (CHaSCI) and head of the Medicine and Therapeutics network in the Institute for Health Research.

 

He is associate editor for Neural Networks, Neural Computing Applications, Applied Soft Computing and Source Code for Biology and Medicine. He also serves on the executive committees of the Healthcare Technologies Professional Network of the IET and in the Royal Academy of Engineering’s UK Focus for Biomedical Engineering. He is an expert evaluator for the European Community and senior consultant with global organisations in the manufacturing, medical devices and clinical research sectors.

After completing a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at Liverpool University in 1983, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Bristol University before joining the electricity generation industry to research into process control, which he taught at Liverpool University from 1987. In 1996 he was appointed to the chair of Industrial Mathematics at Liverpool John Moores University, where he also served as Head of the University’s Graduate School during 2002-7.