Monthly Archives: June 2021

by

Teaching AI to “Do No Harm”

[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ]

Is There an Artificial Intelligence in the House?

For SIAM News:

Medical care routinely involves life-or-death decisions, the allocation of expensive or rare resources, and ongoing management of real people’s health. Mistakes can be costly or even deadly, and healthcare professionals—as human beings themselves—are prone to the same biases and bigotries as the general population.

For this reason, medical centers in many countries are beginning to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their practices. After all, computers in the abstract are not subject to the same foibles as humanity. In practice, however, medical AI perpetuates many of the same biases that are present in the system, particularly in terms of disparities in diagnosis and treatment (see Figure 1).

“Everyone knows that biased data can lead to biased output,” Ravi Parikh, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said. “The issue in healthcare is that the decision points are such high stakes. When you talk about AI, you’re talking about how to deploy resources that could reduce morbidity, keep patients out of the hospital, and save someone’s life. That’s why bias in healthcare AI is arguably one of the most important and consequential aspects of AI.”

[ read the rest at SIAM News ]

by

Bicycles, networks, and biological homeostasis

The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While this article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you gloss over the math.

[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ]

Balancing Homeostasis and Health

For SIAM News:

Human beings are not bicycles. However, mechanistic metaphors for the human body abound. For instance, we compare athletes to finely-tuned machines and look for equations that are derived from mechanics to describe biological processes — even when the relationship is no better than an analogy.

However, the concept of homeostasis clearly exemplifies the breakdown of mechanistic models when one applies them to the human body. Homeostasis is the process by which an organism maintains a stable output regardless of input (within reasonable limits). The most familiar example is human body temperature, which stays within a remarkably small range of values regardless of whether one is sitting in a cold room or walking outside on a hot day.

“In a bicycle, you know what each part is for,” Michael Reed, a mathematician at Duke University, said. “We are not machines with fixed parts; we are a large pile of cooperating cells. The question is, how does this pile of cooperating cells accomplish various tasks?”

[ Read the rest at SIAM News ]