Difference between revisions of "User:DavidWhitten"

Latest revision as of 10:17, 4 March 2020

David Whitten is one of the founders of WorldVistA. A longtime VA employee, he has been using MUMPS since 1981 in many different enviroments. These include in the Department of Veterans Affairs, at MD Anderson Cancer Center with the Protocol Data Management System, as a contractor to the Department of Defense (CHCS) and using standalone FileMan projects.

David is one of the administrators of the VistApedia Wiki, and may be reached by telephone at 713-870-3834.

Here is a useful link to Recent Changes that gives you a LOT of info about what has changed recently on the wiki :

http://www.vistapedia.net/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&hideminor=0&hideliu=0&hidebots=0&limit=1500&days=150&limit=1500

User pages elseWiki

on Wikipedia, my user page currently is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DaveJWhitten 
DaveJWhitten talk contribs (Created on 4 February 2020 at 23:44)

I suspect but cannot prove, that I am Wikipedia user DavidWhitten  (Created on 29 January 2006 at 00:24)

On the Wikipedia page I describe myself as:

My name is Dave Whitten. I added a J (my middle initial) as apparently there are other users with names conflicting with mine. I am a medical informaticist interested in Hospital Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) in general, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs VistA system in particular.

I have used and developed on multiple medical information systems in the past, including CHCS, the systems of LabCorp, the systems of Dow Chemical, the RPMS system of the Indian Health Service, PDMS from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas and other systems that may not have names, or which I have forgotten their names.

I have used and developed on other systems such as Cyc, and other Artificial Intelligence systems. I specialize in ontology systems that are primarily rule based. I have created a wiki for the Public Domain Knowledge Bank to support this effort.

I have some limited experience in Perceptrons, Neural Nets, and the Machine Learning systems which the media call Artificial Intelligence. I wrote the Unofficial Cyc FAQ in the 1980s and 1990s, until Cycorp created their web site. I still am interested in the topic in general with specific emphases.

I am interested in language both human natural languages, and computer languages. My master's degree is as close to a degree in Computational Linguistics as I could create by taking courses from both Computer Science and Linguistics at Rice University, graduating in 1988.

I primarily code in MUMPS, but have worked in many different languages and implementations and can program or have a reading proficiency in many other computer languages, including (alphabetically) APL, several Assembly languages, BASIC, Common Lisp, Fortran, Go, Java, Javascript, Lisp, MUMPS, MIIS, Pascal, Perl, Python, Scheme, Swift, Turbo Pascal, Z, and a passing familiarty with more.

I am currently (as of 2020) on the board of WorldVistA, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the United States that promotes affordable healthcare computing. I have not received compensation for work on the board, nor have I received compensation for any efforts editing any wiki, including the one I maintain about VistA. The page: Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#How to disclose a COI requires me to disclose any potential Conflict of Interest. Since I am not receiving any compensation I am not required to disclose this. I have chosen to disclose this simply to help those reading here of my interests and knowledge. I will review that page more to see if it requires any other disclosure.

I support several websites on the internet, but apparently naming them in a user page is verboten now as it is considered Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_blog,_Web_hosting_service,_social_networking_service,_or_memorial_site so I will mention this to warn others who may try to do this. I had to create this page totally from scratch, as it isn't obvious where the old copy went, nor is there any attempt that I have seen delivered to the owner before such a page is deleted. Apparently, this is better explained in U5. I certainly don't support vandalism, nor spammers who use wikis to promote pages on the World Wide Web on this wiki or any wiki that I am dedicated to furthering. I think it was a sad day when the spammers learned they could put links to other websites in a wiki page.