2025 Annual Conference
This is the sixth year that the University of South Carolina Big Data Health Science Center (BDHSC) has hosted the National Big Data Health Science Conference. The theme of the 2025 conference was “Unlocking the Power of Big Data in Health: Transforming Data into Actionable Intelligence.”
Presenters discussed breakthroughs in Big Data science such as the utilization of Big Data and advanced data analytics to improve the precision diagnosis of infections and other clinical conditions (e.g., epilepsy), the use of geospatial data science for identifying and examining opioid overdose patterns in multimorbidity diseases like HIV and substance use disorder, the importance of balance between realism, security, and utility in synthetic data generation and application, and the ethical landscape to ensure fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy/data protection, human oversight on AI applied to healthcare.
Besides 6 plenary speakers and 80 poster presentations, the conference organized 7 breakout scientific sessions with more than 40 oral presentations around the themes of “Big Data Analytics and Emerging Methodologies”, “Big Data for Public Health and Community Health (I&II), “Big Data for Biomedical Research”, “Big Data for Clinical Practice and Patient Care”, “Big Data Health Science Research: Findings from Africa”, and “Utilization of All of Us Research Platform for HIV Research”. In addition, the conference featured a NIH Trainee Session, a Career Development Luncheon, and a formal Networking Reception. During the NIH trainee session, trainees from four NIH/NIAID funded training programs (three R25s, one T35) at USC presented their experiences in research training in the areas of Big Data and infectious diseases.
One mission of the conference is to provide a platform for students, researchers and healthcare professionals to interact and engage with data science industries. This year, the conference featured a pre-conference SAS Viya training workshop provided by SAS, Inc and a panel presentation on the AI agents and agentic workflows by two IBM innovators/engineers. The IBM presentation described agents as an “evolution of generative AI” capable of planning, multi-step reasoning, action-taking, and self-correction. Agentic use cases for healthcare like mammography screening and medical coding were discussed. Techniques to address challenges of AI, like hallucinations, bias, regulatory compliance, resource consumption, and privacy were provided. Industry advice on the adoption of AI agents, centered on impact on healthcare jobs and education, and the importance of continuous monitoring and evaluation.
2025 Conference Proceedings
This proceeding contains some of the oral and poster presentations from the 6th National Big Data Health Science Conference (Columbia, SC, Feb 13-14, 2025) that was organized by the University of South Carolina Big Data Health Science Center (BDHSC). Proceedings of the 6th National Big Data Health Science Conference were published on July 31, 2025, by BMC Proceedings.
Funding for this conference was made possible (in part) by R13LM014347 from the National Library of Medicine. The views expressed in written conference materials or publications and by speakers and moderators do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Health and Human Services; nor does mention by trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
