Colloquium: Jose Unpingco – West Health Institute Senior Director of Data Science

HDSI welcomes Senior Director of Data Science at the Gary and Mary West Health Institute in La Jolla, a nonprofit, nonpartisan healthcare research organization focused on lowering the cost of healthcare and enabling seniors to age successfully. He is an alumnus and author of technology books. In his talk in the Institute’s Colloquium Lecture Series, Upingco will discuss the growing demand for data science using sensitive medical data. As privacy rights become more important, it is important for data scientists to understand how laws (e.g., HIPAA and other privacy rules) manifest in production systems that maintain a high degree of flexibility while maintaining security and privacy. In this talk, Unpingco will discuss the work of West Health Institute’s Data Science team to architect, build, and deploy flexible, scalable systems that maintain security and privacy for a wide variety of stakeholders and institutions around the country. He will detail the tradeoffs and requirements of building and deploying a secure platform on Amazon Web Services and describe existing and ongoing work to further extend these secure platforms.BIO: Unpingco is Senior Director for Data Science at the Gary and Mary West Health Institute. He is a UC San Diego alumnus who earned his Ph.D. in 1997 from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Prior to joining West Health, he served as on-site technical director for the Department of Defense’s national High Performance Computing Modernization Program (Signal and Image Processing section). In addition to his work at DoD, Dr. Unpingco has extensive industrial experience as a senior engineer at Hughes Aircraft, Raytheon, Mission Research, and ATK, working on a wide range of systems including underwater acoustics, adaptive antennas, radar detection/imaging, and target tracking. Dr. Unpingco is the author of two internationally published books by Springer: “Python for Signal Processing” and “Python for Probability, Statistics and Machine Learning.”