DEI/CISUC Seminars
June 12, Wednesday,
13h (sharp),
Room A.5.4 DEI-FCTUC
Invited Speaker: Nuno Lourenço
Title: "Predicting Glucose in Diabetic Patients Using Structured Grammatical Evolution"
Abstract:
Diabetes is a metabolic disorder that affects large number of patients. According to data from the International Diabetes Federation, 425 million people suffer from this illness and this number is only expected to grow. When diagnosed with diabetes, patients need to oversee the glucose levels, trying to keep them between a range of acceptable values. Before eating, they need to estimate the units of insulin that need to be injected, so that after the meal the glucose levels are in a healthy range. This estimation is made taking into account the current levels of glucose and the amount of carbohydrates that are going to be consumed in the meal. In all this process the patient is likely to commit some mistakes, as there are no clear processes defined and it involves several estimations. However, inrecent years, scientific progress in devices and algorithms allowed for the automation of some parts of this process. In this talk we will discuss a recent approach based on Evolutionary Algorithms, called Structured Grammatical Evolution. The main goal is to generate models that take into account the past glucose values, insulin injections, and the amount of carbohydrate ingested, and can accurately predict what is the amount of insulin that is required for a certain time window.
Short-bio: Nuno Lourenço is an Assistant Professor (non-Tenure) at the University of Coimbra, where he obtained his PhD in Information Science and Technology in 2016. He has been with the Centre for Informatics and Systems of University of Coimbra (CISUC) since 2009, as member of the Evolutionary and Complex Systems (ECOS) group. Formerly, he was appointed as a Senior Research Officer at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. His main research interests are in the areas Bio-Inspired Algorithms, Optimisation and Machine Learning. He is the creator of Structured Grammatical Evolution, a genotypic representation for Grammatical Evolution, and participated in the proposal of a novel approach to automatically design Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) using Evolutionary Computation called DENSER. He served as publication chair for two of the most important conferences of the Evolutionary Computation field namely the PPSN XV and EuroGP 2019. He has authored or co-authored several articles in journals and top conferences from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Intelligence areas and he has been involved as +a researcher in many national and international projects.