What If... Computers Could Save Lives?

24 August 2015

What If... Computers Could Save Lives?

By winning the TV quiz show Jeopardy in 2011, the IBM Watson supercomputer set a new standard for the use of computers in data analytics. Today, the amount of data created about our health is growing at a massive rate. But should we leave crucial decisions about our health to a quiz-winning computer, or do we need something else?

In the next What If Wednesday free public lecture, University of Canterbury Professor Tim David, Director of UC HPC supercomputing centre, will look at the current use of computing power in health and tackle vital social and philosophical questions head on.

In the lecture, Professor David will investigate: “How can computers help us make decisions about our health? How has health data changed over the last decade? And do computers really save lives?

“It will be an interactive lecture with several important questions for people to think about,” he says. “Questions such as, where do we draw the line between the decisions that computers make and the decisions that humans need to make?”

“Do we really want computers to make decisions about our health? And can computers really save human lives?”

Professor David is the Director of the UC HPC supercomputing centre, a high performance computing service facility at the University of Canterbury which facilitates research that depends on access to high performance computational resources. He has a BSc and a PhD in mathematics from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

The University of Canterbury holds free public lectures, the What If Wednesdays (WIW) lecture series, on campus twice a month.
What If Wednesdays (WIW) public lecture: What If... Computers Could Save Lives?

When: 26 Aug 2015, 7pm
Where: C2, Central Lecture Theatres, University of Canterbury, Ilam Road, Ilam, Christchurch

Admission: Free, register to attend at: http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/wiw/

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