Dr. Davide Sottara, PhD
Department of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University - Assistant Professor

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Davide got his M.Sc. Degree (2006) and his Ph.D (2010) in Computer
Science, Electronics and Telecommunications from the University of Bologna.

His research and development interests include artificial intelligence in general and decision support systems in particular, focusing on hybrid systems combining predictive models and rule-based systems. 

Since 2006, he has been working on the development of intelligent DSSs in the environmental (in cooperation with the Italian National Agency for the Energy, Environment and New Technologies) and clinical field. He is a member of the Drools Community, contributing to the core engine research and development, as well as leading an experimental sub-project on the support of various forms of non boolean reasoning (uncertain, fuzzy, semantic and subsymbolic). 

After working as an independent private consultant and as a post-doc researcher at the University of Bologna, he is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University in Scottsdale (AZ), where he works on knowledge representation and reasoning techniques for clinical decision support.
Medicine is not an exact science and clinical practice is mostly based on evidence, which necessarily includes some degree of uncertainty. Clinical Decision Support (CDS), however, is traditionally based on (clinical) guidelines and rules, and implemented with a combination of (business) rules, workflow-based processes and event processing techniques.

None of these frameworks are suitable to model and process the uncertainty required by clinical decision making, while more suitable probabilistic and fuzzy techniques have not yet become mainstream technologies in the field.

In this talk, we will discuss possible methodologies to integrate "hard" and "soft" decision making, ranging from loosely coupled systems to tightly coupled reasoners.