SIS Colloquium

SIS welcomes F. Javier Díez, of the Spanish National University for Distance Education, to the SIS Colloquium Series on Thursday, October 18, 2007.  Dr. Diez, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence, will discuss “Probabilistic Graphical Models for Medical Decision Making.”  The colloquium will take place from 10:30 am to 12:00 noon in Rooms 501 and 522 of the SIS Building.  This lecture is free and open to the public. 

In this lecture, Dr. Díez will present some of the models built at the Research Centre on Intelligent Decision-Support Systems at the Spanish National University for Distance Education for different medical domains. These models include Bayesian networks and influence diagrams, as well as new types of models developed by his group, such as decision analysis networks, networks of probabilistic events in discrete time, and dynamic LIMIDs. 

Professor Díez received a B.S. in Physics from the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia / Spanish University for Distance Education) and a M.S. in Theoretical Physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.  He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1994 by the Department of Computer Science and Automatics of the UNED.  His thesis on artificial intelligence, entitled Sistema Experto Bayesiano para Ecocardiografía (Bayesian Expert System for Echocardiography), was awarded the Fundesco Prize for Doctoral Dissertations.

He is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence at UNED. His main research areas are the management of uncertainty in artificial intelligence, especially with Bayesian networks and influence diagrams, and the construction of medical expert systems.  He has been "principal investigator" for the two phases of the Elvira project and for the project Diagnostic Systems Based on Graphical Decision-Theoretic Methods, a joint collaboration between the USA, Poland and Spain.