eScience to tackle challenges in Health-RI

The Netherlands eScience center (NLeSC) is a multi-disciplinary center, where knowledge from different scientific domains is combined with eScience expertise, for example in natural language processing, data mining and machine learning, semantic web technologies and visualization. eScience research engineers develop open source software tools, which are made freely available via the eStep platform*, and use them to tackle a wide range of scientific questions, e.g. in life sciences and health, environmental sciences, physics and humanities. The Health-RI objectives, to enable personalized medicine and health, will require the integration of a diverse range of expertise’s and technologies. For example, to enhance scientific discovery linked data approaches need to be combined with interactive data visualization and smart methods to search for relationships and patterns in large semantically connected datasets. At NLeSC we are developing unique expertise in generalizing and combining algorithms and software and data tools across domains. Our current life-sciences and eHealth projects include biomarker research, image processing, automatic diagnosis of brain data (EEG) and data of wearables, development of a FAIR data infrastructure and computational workflows for drug development. Based on our experience with this diverse portfolio of life science projects, we are developing a suite of loosely coupled software modules and libraries to tackle various challenges also posed by the Health-RI objectives. References *http://estep.esciencecenter.nl