Adam D'Souza

Biography

Adam is a Senior Data Scientist at the Centre for Health Informatics, having joined the team in 2017. He is cross appointed with AHS, as a Senior Analyst on the Provincial Research Data Services team. He completed a PhD in physics at the University of Calgary in 2013. His thesis work was theoretical and computational in nature, focusing on methodologies for developing quantum computers using condensed matter systems (for example, cold atoms in optical lattices). Before joining the team at CHI, Adam was a co-owner and director of a data science firm fulfilling service contracts for academic and government clients, involving data acquisition, synthesis, visualisation, analysis, and report writing. 

Adam has worked on a variety of projects within CHI, and particularly enjoys the opportunity to learn new things. For example, he has been involved in machine learning and natural language processing studies to identify cardiovascular diseases and Charlson comorbidities from administrative and free-text electronic medical record data. He has also worked on topic modeling (natural language processing) studies to understand the themes of patient-reported complaints with their experiences being hospitalized in Alberta. 

He has a number of interests associated with data privacy issues; he was closely involved in establishing an information management agreement between AHS and UofC that enables previously impossible research analytics on large volumes of sensitive data within a secure environment. He also provided theoretical (mathematical support) for a project that developed tools for privacy-preserving data linkage, and is presently involved in studies using federated learning to train machine learning models using data from disparate sites without requiring data sharing between sites.

He is interested and experienced as well in gathering and transforming data from disparate sources (e.g website, PDFs, Word documents) to structured datasets that are more convenient for analytics. He is familiar with all of the major AH and AHS data sources commonly used for research, as well as several others (e.g. Connect Care, Diagnostic Imaging, CD/OM, ImmARI, Sunrise Clinical Manager). He has strong mathematical skills developed from his physics education, and has taken courses over several years to extend this knowledge into the statistical realm as well (biostatistics, mathematical statistics, theory of machine learning).