Hi Mike.
Welcome to the family and happy to see you here.
But: Any chance we can get anything more specific than “Mike”? It’s not really a unique identifier for a person. Or is that part of your cybersecurity persona? 
Also: what’s EMS?
I everyone, I’m very happy to be with you, hope to find more friends and to find out more useful information!
I’m Antonija, an incoming research engineering intern @ Real World Evidence and Big Data team in Novartis. I’m interested in developing machine learning solutions for thyroid impairments and rheumatoid arthritis conditions.
Hi This is Hong Yu from UMass. Excited to be a part of the community!
Hi. This is Vasant Honavar from Penn State. I am new to the OHDSI community. My primary expertise is in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Big Data Analytics and Knowledge Representation. I have worked on applications of machine learning in Bioinformatics (especially analysis and prediction of macro-molecular interactions and interfaces) and Immunoinformatics.
Some of my current work is focused on predictive and causal modeling from longitudinal biomedical big data (EHR, environmental, socio-economic, behavioral, and genomic) data; analysis of multi-omics data; analysis and modeling of brain activity data; data and computational infrastructure for collaborative data intensive discovery; computational infrastructure for data access and use policy compliant analysis of sensitive data.
I look forward to working with the OHDSI community on topics of mutual interest.
Welcome, Vasant. Great to have another member of the NSF NE Big Data Hub on OHDSI. George
Hi all.
I am Avi Yaeli. I work at IBM Waston Health in the Visual Analytics group. We build interactive visualizations tightly coupled with advanced analytics to support various data science and decision support tasks in Healthcare & Life Science. The tools we build analyze both clinical and behavioral data and can be used in multiple web environments, including Jupyter Notebooks across several language kernels. One of my current focus areas is temporal analysis of clinical pathways. I’ve seen there’s related research study going on in OHDSI and interested to learn more about OHSDI and explore collaboration opportunities.
Welcome Avi.
(Are you allowed to misspell “Watson” and not put your employment at risk?)
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Hi all,
My name is Teng Liaw, I am a Professor of General Practice at UNSW Medicine Australia. Friends describe me as a clinical informatician masquerading as a general practitioner (family physician). We have a data repository of linked EHR data from multiple general practice and other primary and secondary care services in a spatial health neighbourhood to conduct integrated care and health services research. I am about to embark on the mapping this data set to the OMOP-CDM. So any advice and support will be more than welcome.
Kind regards, Teng
Teng:
Welcome to the family.
Not sure what a “spatial health neighborhood” is. Does it have a lot of space?
You will probably need help with the mapping of the Australian vocabularies. Feel free to contact @gregk, he and his team just did two Australian drug vocabularies.
Dear Gowtham, hello, welcome to OHDSI.I am wondering if we can connect as I have a health plan with a question on the value of them using OMOP common data model, they are re-architecting their whole approach to business intelligence. I will be posting this question also in the general forum, but due to your expertise thought you might have opinions. - Thanks, Shawn Dolley sdolley at cloudera dot com
Hey Shawn… Happy to connect. We are introducing/evaluating OMOP common data model for our analytic needs - will email you.
Hi, all:
My name is Greg Zancewicz. I am currently CTO with an HIT startup interested in integrating patient cost data with CDS tools, so there are a lot of areas within OHDSI that are of interest. I not exactly sure where my company’s and my personal interests intersect with OHDSI activities, but I am looking to contribute some of my time to supporting a work group that needs help and getting to know people. Any suggestions would be welcome. I’ve been involved in health information now for the last 4 years or so. It is a very interesting problem space.
Hi all,
I am Bridget Wang. I am a rheumatologist and junior faculty at Columbia University medical center. I am interested in epidemiology, comparative effectiveness research and outcomes research in rheumatic diseases, and it’s a great opportunity to join OHDSI. I’d love to collaborate on future projects.
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Hello all,
I’m William Hsu, a biomedical informaticist and Assistant Professor of Radiological Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. My research interests touch upon four primary areas: 1) the formulation of decision models to discover optimal diagnostic or treatment strategies for individual patients from longitudinal observational data; 2) the formalization of (causal) knowledge representations from scientific and clinical trial literature to improve predictive models; 3) the development of methods for constructing and evaluating predictive models that are generalizable; and 4) the creation of applications built upon these predictive models that assist clinicians with interpreting available evidence. Of late, I have been interested in predictive model sharing, reproducibility, and transportability and enjoyed watching @Rijnbeek’s talk at last year’s OHDSI annual meeting. I’m also very appreciative to @msuchard for orienting me to the existing toolchain for creating and sharing models within OHDSI.
I look forward to engaging with the Patient-level prediction working group and the broader OHDSI community.
Best,
William
We have a lot of space in Australia. Seriously though, I am using it interchangeably with geographical (as opposed to virtual) to study health services meaningfully.
Hi All,
I am phD from Shanghai institute of applied physics, Chinese academy of science. I am a data scientist from a data analyst company in China which is focused on the clinical real world research. I am so glad to find a organization who has been engaging the same work with us. Until now we have finished several observational studies, such as the analysis of variability of blood pressure for hypertensive patients, the characteristic description of the patients who use antibiotic, the comparative effectiveness research, drug economy evaluation and some data mining work. I have so much questions want to discuss with you. We also would love to have a chance to collaborate with you!
Thank you!
Hi everyone,
I’m Harris Weinstein, a software developer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I’m just starting out with bioinformatics and have a lot to learn. I am most interested in the time/resource efficiency of data processing.
Hello all,
I’m a pharmacist working for Johnson&Johnson in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, I’am part of a core team leader in Latin America in the field of Real World Evidence. We are now working in partnership with physicians (psychiatrists, reumatologists, oncologists, hematologists, infectologists) and with other stakeholders such as payers, regulatory agencies,and so on. At this moment we are collecting possible data bases and partners with who we can work, so, we found very interesting the work you have done…so…we want to get close and establish a web of collaboration and knowledge!
Thank you!
Best regards!
Hi everyone,
I am Chetan Vora, an architect at Quintiles, now QuintilesIMS. Our team has been involved with processing of HL7 EMR data using Hadoop for use by Pharma clients. I find it somewhat amusing that we have been using OMOP as an internal format for some time now but we only recently discovered this group. 
We are also now excited to be “work collegues” with folks like Christian Reich and Dino at IMS who have been pioneers of the OHDSI initiative here. I am definitely eager to be a part of this large community and hoping to learn from and share learnings with others. I come from a software developer background and while I straddle a higher level role as an architect, I do often love getting hands-on with code and technology. Some of my areas of interest and collaboration are big data in clinical setting, text NLP and large scale search using Solr.
When not thinking of work, I love to spend time with my wife and two kids, photography and biking the awesome mountains of North Carolina.