Leader of work package 8, a philosopher with a background in IT, and now the CEO and owner of the IT development company Rheasoft. Kim Gammelgaard is an important part of the BETTER Project and brings his specialised knowledge and experience to the BETTER Project.

Watch his interview to hear more about Kim’s role, his motivation and expectations for the BETTER project.

Clinical partner of use case 1, a molecular biologist, an expert in rare diseases from the Institute of Molecular Genetics, Genetic Engineering from University of Belgrade in Serbia. Maja Stojiljkovic is an important part of the BETTER Project and brings her specialised knowledge and experience to the table.

Watch her interview to hear more about Maja’s role, her motivation and expectations for the BETTER project.

Part of work package 4, with a PhD degree in Information Technology from Politecnico di Milano winning the "Best Ph.D. thesis award on Big Data & Data Science" from the CINI Big Data Lab and the CAiSE PhD Award. She has authored more than 30 journal papers and 30 conference/workshop proceedings papers, as well as 10 book chapters. And we could keep going with reasons why Anna Bernasconi is an important asset to the BETTER Project!

Watch her interview to hear more about Anna’s role, her motivation and expectations for the BETTER project. .

The BETTER Project has a new project coordinator!
Before we present our new coordinator, we want to say thank you to Matteo Bregonzio for his dedication to the BETTER Project and wish him alle the best in the future!

Without further ado, please allow us to present BETTER’s new project coordinator Michele Compare from Datrix:

I’m thrilled to share that I've been appointed by Datrix to coordinate the BETTER Project. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on a project that truly resonates with my expertise and interests, and to collaborate with an outstanding consortium partners to advance the research on cancer.

A little about me: I'm CTO of Datrix, with a background in Nuclear Engineering. I earned my MSc from the University of Naples Federico II and my PhD from Politecnico di Milano, both with honors. I've also had the privilege of conducting research at Politecnico di Milano and leading R&D projects to apply AI to industrial problems.

I'm eager to dive into this new challenge and work alongside the talented team involved in BETTER. Let's make a real impact!

Curiosity has always been behind innovation, especially in healthcare. Think about how far we have come: from stacks of paper-based patient records, scattered across different hospitals, and difficult to share, to an era where AI has the potential to revolutionize medicine. Today, federated learning allows institutions to collaborate on research while preserving patient privacy.

But there’s a challenge: how do we ensure that data from different hospitals, recorded in different formats and languages, can work together?

Without a shared structure, even the most advanced AI models would struggle to make sense of fragmented and inconsistent data. That’s where conceptual modeling becomes the secret ingredient that transforms scattered information into a unified and powerful resource for medical research. By creating a common language, conceptual modeling allows different datasets to “speak” to each other, ensuring that AI can learn from them in a meaningful way.

At the heart of the BETTER project, conceptual modeling plays a crucial role in three key areas: ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, FAIRification (making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), and Synthetic Data Generation (generating high-quality synthetic datasets that retain the statistical properties of real data while ensuring patient confidentiality).

This isn’t just about making AI work; it’s about making it work right. With the BETTER project leading the way, we are not just unlocking the potential of AI in healthcare. We are redefining what is possible. The road ahead is exciting, and conceptual modeling is lighting the path forward.