Beyond EVE: Events

Improve health with behavioral economics

Wirtschaftsuniversitaet Wien — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 20:38:36 +0100

A new panacea?

Why is it so hard to get rid of unhealthy behavior? According to the theory of behavioral health economics, unhealthy behaviors are partly due to cognitive biases that adversely affect decision-making. The corresponding public health strategy is to identify these biases and design interventions that address them. Based on practical examples like diabetes management or physical activity, we discuss successful health promotion strategies based on the combined insights of economics and psychology.

This event is organized by the Department of Socioeconomics

Artificial Intelligence and Discrimination Risks in the Health Sector

Computers, Privacy & Data Protection — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 11:51:47 +0100

Risks of discrimination related to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making are already well-documented in several domains, including policing, hiring, loans, and benefit fraud detection. In the past year, a number of cases have indicated that the health and medical sector are not immune to the discriminatory effects of AI. Studies have shown that algorithms widely used across hospitals and health systems to guide patient care, on everything from heart surgery and kidney care, to cesarean birth and prioritizing patients following the backlog of appointments caused by coronavirus, can be racially and culturally biased, and can exacerbate existing health inequalities.

• In this panel we will discuss the risks of bias, AI-driven discrimination, and unfair differentiation in the health sector. Is there something specific to discrimination risks in the health sector?

• Are the trade-offs between the benefits and risks of AI different in this sector as opposed to other sectors?

• Is there a health sector-specific notion of fairness? If so, are sector-specific rules needed for AI in health?

• Should legal protection against AI-driven discrimination and unfair differentiation be improved and who should attend to this: non-discrimination scholars or bioethicists?

We aim for a lively discussion panel: no presentations and no slides, but a discussion among the panelists and with the audience. The panel will be made up of experts from different disciplines and backgrounds.

Moderator:

Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius iHub & iCIS Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)

Speakers:

Minna Ruckenstein Tena Šimonović Einwalter Equinet (HR)

Carlos Castillo Universitat Pompeu Fabra (ES)

Tamar Sharon iHub, Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)

YAPILI

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 15:34:15 +0100

YAPILI delivers health@hand – offering new opportunities for many Africans to connect to local and western health professionals in an efficient and confidential way. In the societies, where professional health advice is hard & expensive to get, YAPILI offers affordable, anonymous and secure channel to seek medical care in case of pregnancy & family planning, diabetes & hypertension, HIV & sexual health, mental health and generic health questions. YAPILI was started in November 2014 by a group of four young entrepreneurs who met in East Africa through the startup incubator, Ampion. Eventually our team grew to include skills ranging from front-end development to public health and policy expertise.

Corona crisis fuels hate against Chinese on Twitter: Commentary

PIK Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 18:34:30 +0100

The COVID-19 pandemic has the world firmly in its grip with millions of confirmed cases worldwide and whole countries in full or partial lockdown. Despite calls for solidarity across borders and countless local support initiatives, various incidents prove that the corona outbreak has also given rise to a series of racist attacks against Chinese people and people with Asian looking features both on the streets and in social media networks. A team of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has now investigated the use of discriminating language against Chinese people in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter.

“When normally we analyse societal effects of weather extremes, now we used the corona outbreak as a study case to better understand social responses to extreme events”, explains Leonie Wenz, author and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “Using social media data, we basically counted English language tweets containing a set of key word combinations like Chinese AND Corona AND hate and examined the evolution of this daily tweet count since the corona outbreak”, Annika Stechemesser, co- author and also at PIK, adds. “The picture thus unveiled was quite striking: On March 11th the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic; stock markets around the world crashed –and within the first half of March, the number of offensive tweets in our dataset increased by more than 1000%”, she lays out.

The future of health data

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 18:52:47 +0100

A guide to a research-compatible electronic patient file

Under the title “Zukunft Gesundheitsdaten — Wegweiser zu einer forschungskompatiblen elektronischen Patientenakte” (Future health data — a guide to a research-compatible electronic patient file), the iRights.Lab developed a comprehensive study on the subject of eHealth on behalf of Bundesdruckerei (federal printing house). It shows which challenges have to be mastered so that Germany can also use the potential of digitalization in the field of eHealth.

Here the study can be dowloaded in German.

Next Generation Environmentally Friendly Antibiotics

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 18:29:41 +0100

Resistance to antibiotics is a severe problem in contemporary medicine. Many antibiotics inhibit protein biosynthesis by hampering the ribosome function. Structures of bacterial ribosomes in complex with these antibiotics illuminated common pathways of antibiotics inhibitory action, but not the species-specific diversity in infectious-diseases susceptibility. Recent structural studies on ribosome from a multi-resistant pathogenic bacterium and careful comparisons to ribosomes from non-pathogenic bacteria revealed novel structural motifs, essential to protein biosynthesis but not located in the primary ribosomal active sites, hence no mechanism for modification leading to resistance of these sites is currently known. These led to the design of antibiotics with desired properties that can be optimized in terms of their chemical properties, toxicity and penetration, alongside species-specificity, thus preserving the microbiome, as well as in terms of bio degradability, thus reducing the ecological hazards caused by the spread of the current antibiotics’ metabolites.

Leopoldina Lecture by Nobel Laureate Prof. Dr. Ada Yonath The event is open to all interested parties.