April 2021: Akiva presents KI in the Entrepreneurs Salon

The seventh Edmond J. Safra Biomedical Informatics Entrepreneurs Salon took place on April 21, 2021. Some 60 participants from industry, hospitals and academia joined the online meeting.

Prof. Ron Shamir, head of the Edmond J. Safra Center, opened the event. Prof. Noam Shomron, Edmond J. Safra Center member (Medicine) and Chair of the Salon organizing committee, introduced the speaker, Dr. Pini Akiva, CEO of KI, the Israeli Institute for Applied Research in Computational Health.

Dr. Akiva gave an inspiring talk titled "Driving computational health research towards impact". He introduced KI, an Israeli non-profit institute focusing on computational health. By applying state-of-the-art big data methodologies to real-world clinical data, KI’s multidisciplinary team aims to improve healthcare and lead to discoveries for the benefit of all society. Dr. Akiva gave examples from projects on improving guidelines for tracking infants in Tipat Halav centers, early detection of post-partum depression risk, and analyzing COVID19 symptoms. The talk was followed by a lively Q&A session.

The Salon series, an initiative of the Center that was launched last year, is a forum to promote entrepreneurship at the convergence of biology, medicine, and computing. It aims to create a meeting, interaction and networking forum for academics, industry, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists interested in joining together biology, medicine and computing. The series is a collaboration with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the BIES series.