Machine learning is the fastest growing field in computer science [Jordan, M. I. & Mitchell, T. M. 2015. Machine learning: Trends, perspectives, and prospects. Science, 349, (6245), 255-260], and it is well accepted that health informatics is amongst the greatest challenges [LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. & Hinton, G. 2015. Deep learning. Nature, 521, (7553), 436-444 ], e.g. large-scale aggregate analyses of anonymized data can yield valuable insights addressing public health challenges and provide new avenues for scientific discovery [Horvitz, E. & Mulligan, D. 2015. Data, privacy, and the greater good. Science, 349, (6245), 253-255]. Privacy is becoming a major concern for machine learning tasks, which often operate on personal and sensitive data. Consequently, privacy, data protection, safety, information security and fair use of data is of utmost importance for health data science.
Research topics covered by this special session include but are not limited to the following topics:

– Production of Open Data Sets
– Synthetic data sets for learning algorithm testing
– Privacy preserving machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery
– Data leak detection
– Data citation
– Differential privacy
– Anonymization and pseudonymization
– Securing expert-in-the-loop machine learning systems
– Evaluation and benchmarking

This special session will bring together scientists with diverse background, interested in both the underlying theoretical principles as well as the application of such methods for practical use in the biomedical, life sciences and health care domain. The cross-domain integration and appraisal of different fields will provide an atmosphere to foster different perspectives and opinions; it will offer a platform for novel crazy ideas and a fresh look on the methodologies to put these ideas into business.

Accepted Papers will be published in a Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS Volume.