BIL Conference

Pillbox – Identify Unknown Drugs

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:09:55 +0000

About the Talk
Pillbox is a tool for rapidly identifying unknown pills. It combines high-resolution images of tablets and capsules with FDA-approved appearance information (imprint, shape, color, etc.) to enable users to visually search for and identify an unknown substance.

This is a great tool for poison control, doctors, or anyone who is trying to identify drugs based on pictures and/or descriptions.

Best of all, all the data is public domain and they’re building an API, which will allow other companies to build tools on top of it.

About the Speaker
David Hale works for the NIH as the Project Manager of Pillbox. Pillbox lies at the intersection of his interests: patient safety, biomedical informatics and user experience.

Personal Website | Twitter

About the Conference
BIL:PIL is a healthcare unconference, bringing the concepts and ideals of the BIL Conference to the Healthcare industry. We held BIL:PIL 2009 on October 30-31, 2009 in San Diego at the San Diego State University’s BioScience Center. More information at bilpil.com.

Attraction

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:35:34 +0000

About the Talk
When you become more comfortable with yourself, it will improve all aspects of your life, including your dating life.

About the Speaker
David Wygant is a dating coach and image-maker.

About the Conference
BIL2009 was held at CSULB in Long Beach, CA on Feb 13-14.

Communities in Healthcare

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:00:43 +0000

About the Speaker

Chia Hwu is the Community Manager for 23andme and a former organic chemist. She has worked in biotech and tech, been a volunteer coordinator and online community manager at various start-ups. You can find her on Twitter (@chiah) and at her blog, The Subtle Influence.

The Top 10 BIL Videos for 2009

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:57:38 +0000

It’s been about 6 months since we’ve launched the new BIL Conference site to showcase the videos from past BILs.

Here’s the list of the ten most popular talks by traffic:

The Story of TOMS Shoes by Blake Mycoski (founder of TOMS)
Your Religion is False by Joel Grus
How To Do Cool Things Around the World by Alex Lightman
Teaching Kids to Code with Kodu by Lynn Langit
Open Source Architecture: From TED Prize to Reality by Cameron Sinclair
Rethinking the Modern GUI by Jayson Elliot
What’s Funny about the Interwebs by Ben Huh (CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger)
University of the Future by Alexandros Pagidas
Deep Learning for Artificial Intelligence by Joseph Turian
Demo: Brainwave Controlled iPhone App by Eric Gradman

If you enjoyed the talks, try and make it out to BIL 2010.

You can also subscribe to the Video RSS feed to get notified of the newest videos. We’re currently posting videos from BIL 2009 and BIL:PIL 2009.

Personalized, Open Source Therapies for Breast Cancer

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:14:25 +0000

About the Talk
The inspiration for The Pink Army Collective is open source software successes like Apache and Linux that compete with billion-dollar software giants. We believe open source biotechnology can do the same with big pharma, and we’re creating a community of professionals to build our own drug development company.

We’re focusing on breast cancer to start, and because we’re structurally different than any other biotech or pharma, we can take novel approaches to making medicines. In fact, rather than use the conventional drug development “pipeline”, famous for being slow and expensive, we’re championing a new system that we believe will be able to produce safe, effective, and individually personalized medicines quickly and inexpensively today, and be faster and cost even less as further improvements are made.

About the Speaker
I am a consultant-catalyst for open source biology, synthetic biology, the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) program, DIYbio, and open innovation models, with a focus on Canada. I am also faculty and co-chair of the biotechnology and bioinformatics track at the Singularity University.

Open Collaboration Reinventing the Healthcare Industry

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:04:05 +0000

About the Talk
In this BIL:PIL presentation, Scott Johnson, founder and president of the MRF, describes the high costs of the traditional medical research system (how it hurts individuals with chronic diseases through loss of productive years, loss of years in life, pain, cost to families) as well as the financial costs of the system.

Johnson then dissects how and why the research system is broken and how he tackled the problem with an outsider’s view, a “clean sheet of paper” and a plan.

About the Speaker
Scott Johnson is the founder and president of the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF), which established the potential of myelin repair as an alternative to current immunosuppressant therapies for multiple sclerosis and is speeding up the process of bringing those treatments to patients through a new model for conducting medical research.

Evo Devo Universe

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:40:54 +0000

About the Talk
Biological systems engage in evolutionary (variational and selective) process, and they also develop (have a life cycle, and engage in a predetermined, predictable and convergent series of hierarchical emergences). This analogy can also be applied to the universe.

More information on this subject at evodevouniverse.com

About the Speaker
John Smart is a futurist and scholar of accelerating change. He is founder and president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, an organization that does “outreach, education, research, and advocacy with respect to issues of accelerating change.”

About the Conference
BIL2009 was held at CSULB in Long Beach, CA on Feb 13-14.

Deep Learning for Artificial Intelligence

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:05:34 +0000

About the Speaker
Joseph Turian has been working on artificial intelligence research since 1996. His focus is on using sophisticated machine learning techniques to approach large-scale problems in natural language. He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Université de Montréal, studying deep learning methods with Professor Yoshua Bengio, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms.

About the Conference
BIL2009 was held at CSULB in Long Beach, CA on Feb 13-14.

Rethinking the Modern GUI

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:06:42 +0000

About the Talk
Why are we stuck with the same user interface computers had 30 years ago? Jayson explores the future of the Graphical User Interface.

About the Speaker
Jayson Elliot is a User Experience designer, writer and speaker.

About the Conference
BIL2009 was held at CSULB in Long Beach, CA on Feb 13-14.

University of the Future

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:20:50 +0000

About the Talk

We finish high-school and know more about math than we do of ourselves. Yet knowing ourselves is more important than algebra. Current education does not create free, creative and wise individuals, but workers for the requirements of the market. Most universities give you an education that will supply you with a career – not a good life. But careers, as the etymology of the word betrays, are roads for carts – not for human beings.

In this talk, Alexandros Pagidas explores what the future of education should look like, which includes:

Development of skills instead of the memorizing of information.
Renaissance style Curriculum
Project Based learning
Entrepreneurship
Online Tools
Directed at All Ages
Based on Alternative Business Models
Main Ability Cultivated

More information on this talk here.

About the Conference
BIL2009 was held at CSULB in Long Beach, CA on Feb 13-14.