COFES 2010 (Day 2) – Keynote

The Day 2 keynote speech was delivered by Omid Moghadam from the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. Omid also chairs the National Development Board for the Ingnite Institute for Individual Health. He is an inventor and holds 32 patents and his knowledge and experience spans across the engineering and health care domains,

Omid spoke about what he called a “disruptive opportunity” and design and engineering software vendors (basically the bulk of his audience) to venture into bioinformatics and genomics sectors. For those of you who don’t know what bioinformatics is (I didn’t till today), it is the application of information technology and computer science to the field of molecular biology, a study of biology at the molecular level. Genomics is the study of an organism’s heredity which is encoded in its DNA.

You might wonder how CAD software that we use to design everything not made by God could intrude into God’s department. Omid keynote was titled “From Product Informatics to BioInformatics” and he set out to explain how CAD software vendors could play a part in the health care industry.