Dr Karin Verspoor works at the intersection of Science and Technology, applying computation to analysis and interpretation of biological and clinical data, particularly unstructured text data.

Karin is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as well as the Deputy Director of the University's Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre.

She was previously a Principal Researcher at NICTA's Victoria Research Lab and served as the Scientific Director for Health and Life Sciences. Karin headed a research team at NICTA in Biomedical Informatics.

Karin moved to Melbourne in December 2011 from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where she was a Research Assistant Professor in the Center for Computational Pharmacology and Faculty on the Computational Bioscience Program. She also spent five years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, nearly five years in start-ups during the US Tech Bubble, and a year as a Research Fellow at Macquarie University. She received her undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Rice University (Houston, TX) and her MSc and PhD degrees in Cognitive Science and Natural Language from the University of Edinburgh (UK).

Topics covered include:

• Karin's take on the future of healthcare and the role will AI play, given her unique vantage point on the topic. We also cover the key building blocks that make this future possible
• Whether there are new risks associated with a more technologically advanced healthcare future
• We've seen public outcry over the My Health Record program with people opting out and question marks over doctors willingness to upload data to the system. We discuss what this means for the future of healthcare
• Whether tech companies like Apple and Fitbit will become significant players in the health space
• Karin's take on what AI will do to the job market in healthcare if AI continues to advance at its current rate
• Is more regulation around data - eg GDPR or similar - a must-have for Australia if we want to embrace a more data-driven approach to healthcare?
• Where Australia ranks in terms of governments and companies leading the charge on transforming healthcare
• What Karin's colleagues in medicine think about the rapid pace of technology innovation