Jonas Almeida

Jonas has a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from the University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal. Before joining his current position at the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics, Jonas worked in teaching positions at multiple universities. As Chief Data Scientist at the National Cancer Institute, he focuses on accelerating the investigation of epidemiologic and genetic causes of cancer by developing innovative digital methods that advance the computational research infrastructure for precision prevention.

2021 Talk: Data Commons in the wild – it’s an API world out there

The increasing reliance on distributed epidemiological data sources for time-sensitive analysis defines an emergent computational commons space: API ecosystems supporting epidemiology data commons. This space has been forced to evolve significantly to meet the real-time requirements of COVID-19 information systems, to the extent that syntactic interoperability often takes precedence over aligning data structures with conceptual context.

This presentation will explore how the engineering of API ecosystems responds to governance and scope, before it responds to the analytical frameworks that triggered their development, as illustrated with hands-on visits to a number of live data sources. It will be argued that both knowledge representation and statistical learning (AI) benefit from being an afterthought of this evolutionary process.