[ANN] Digital Innovation Workshop - Lavigny/Switzerland

The workshop sadly was cancelled

Context for the workshop:

Let’s learn together! As an entrepreneur and innovator in the healthcare space, the event organizer Dominique Pahud has been looking for programing languages that have key functionality tied to trust including data immutability, data provenance, data coupling and decoupling which are really important for most healthcare applications including the associated analytics and data science. These properties typically are associated with either advanced object oriented programming languages like Java or functional programming languages like Clojure. Although not perfect, the programming language Pharo is the closest thing Dominique has found that combines elements of both worlds. He has been working with leaders and key contributors within the Pharo community including Stéphane Ducasse (Professor and Researcher at French Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Institute INRIA) and Marcus Denker (Tenured researcher at INRIA) to explore incorporating trust features into the language itself which they have recently started working on. The other reason for Dominique's interest in the language is the integration of an advanced IDE (Integrated Development Environment), developed by Tudor Girba, which allows you to work on the code live and where you have full visibility and access to all layers of the technology stack. This is extremely important if you want to develop highly flexible/dynamic technology stacks that people can understand and work with. This can drastically improve software development productivity.

The challenge and opportunity: Pharo is a fringe language that most people don't know about (yet...) It's the latest incarnation of Smalltalk, the language created by Alan Kay and colleagues at Xerox Park in the 1970s which was the parent of most subsequent advanced object oriented programing languages including Java, Python and Ruby.

Applied example where Pharo and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Glamorous Toolkit could be used:

A Personal Health Record (PHR) application with advanced features including dynamic/flexible ontologies/semantics, revocable informed consent and trust elements. Kertyx, a company in the formation stage, is looking to deploy this solution to support collaborative research efforts between academic research centers, care teams with different specialties in the realms of naturopathy, fitness/movement, acupuncture, and other synergistic fields in a patient centric and controlled fashion. Let’s establish what works in a systematic fashion and build quality improvement processes to scale it so that more patients/people can benefit!