MIT CSAIL and STEMM Global Launched a Virtual Summit on AI in Healthcare 

BOSTON, Aug. 24, 2020 -- MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and STEMM Global Scientific Community announced that they will gather thought leaders from all over the world at a virtual summit dedicated to AI in Healthcare on October 1-2, 2020. The aim of the summit is to boost effective collaboration among leading AI academics, healthcare experts and business leaders to support innovation in healthcare.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the future is now. Scientists, AI researchers, healthcare experts and business leaders will come together to discuss how AI is helping to address the ongoing healthcare crisis and look at the technologies being developed now that will change the future of healthcare. It is now crucial that we launch and drive innovation and development of AI for good.

The summit provides a platform to enable collaboration around cutting edge research including contact tracing, vaccines, ethics, diagnostics, precision medicine, electronic healthcare records and more. The program is focused on the ways that AI helps address the biggest challenges in the healthcare industry and features panel discussions uniting experts across business and academia.

The first day of the summit is dedicated to existing technologies. The program explores current healthcare applications of AI — spanning diagnostics, patient care, robotics, and more. Both established researchers and inspiring start-ups provide their point of view. Critical issues raised by using AI in healthcare are also considered, including diversity and access to healthcare services.

The second day of the summit covers the promises of AI for the future. AI experts discuss how AI will help to overcome public health challenges, and which technologies will transform the field in the future. The impact and necessity of global regulation, ethics, and privacy — key topics of interest in the professional community — will also be discussed.

Daniela Rus, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the director of MIT CSAIL will convene the summit.

An important motivator to hold this summit now is to address diversity and inclusion across AI and healthcare. Based on estimates, women represent only 22% of the global AI workforce, and that number only shrinks as you move up the leadership ranks. One of the key goals for the STEMM MIT CSAIL AI in Healthcare Summit organizers is to promote women in AI research and industry and to highlight women in STEM making improvements to healthcare.

Curing disease is among the most important grand challenges facing humanity today, and for this we need all the talent, creativity, and diversity of experiences that women bring to the table,” says Rus. This symposium highlights amazing work in AI and healthcare by incredible women. Our world is so much richer for these contributions.”

To further support diversity across AI and healthcare, STEMM Global and MIT CSAIL invited Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) to participate in the summit and boost discussions on how to spur female professionals in tech, business and academia communities to support each other. AWIP is a global non-profit that is dedicated to empowering more women and underrepresented minorities into leadership roles in technology.

“AWIP is proud to support the STEMM MIT CSAIL AI in Healthcare Summit to provide an industry perspective to solving the challenges we see in healthcare with AI”, said Nancy Wang, Founder & CEO of AWIP. “Healthcare and AI are two fields where women have only recently begun to attain representation in leadership ranks, and it truly takes a collaboration between academia and industry to make meaningful strides forward.”

Panel sessions include:

• AI’s Impact Today
• The Rush for Treatments and Vaccines: AI’s Processing Power
• The Importance of Diversity in AI and Healthcare
• Emerging Technologies: Startups Changing Healthcare
• Possibilities for Tomorrow: The Promise of AI
• Transformative Technologies: Advancements Through AI
• Global Healthcare Policy: Security, Ethics, and Data governance
• Covid-19 and Public Health Challenges: AI’s Impact

List of confirmed speakers:

• Prof Daniela Rus, Director of MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
• Dr.Amar Gupta, Research Scientist at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
• Prof David Barber, Director of the UCL Center for Artificial Intelligence
• Prof Giorgio Metta, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute of Technology
• Prof Mihaela Van der Schaar, Director of Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine, Cambridge University
• Prof Julia Schnabel, Director of EPSRC CDT in Smart Medical Imaging, King’s College London
• Prof Andreas Maier, Head of the Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)
• Prof Marie-Francine Moens, Director of the Language Intelligence and Information Retrieval Lab, KU Leuven

And many more…

Through a virtual platform, participants will have an opportunity to discuss the latest AI breakthroughs in Healthcare, generate and influence the discussion, host meetings and interact through video calls. Live streaming of the talks will be available at no cost to the general public.

The STEMM Organizing Committee commented: “We are proud that the collaboration between the STEMM Scientific Community and MIT CSAIL has enabled us to hold this virtual event on AI in Healthcare at this scale. It’s crucial now for AI experts and business leaders to have a platform to align with each other, connect, and share the experience on managing pandemics but also finding new ways for the future” (Professor Anna Baldycheva, Kate Berseneva, Sophia Schteiner).

About MIT CSAIL 

CSAIL is committed to pioneering new approaches to computing that will bring about positive changes in the way people around the globe live, play, and work. We focus on developing fundamental new technologies, conducting basic research that furthers the field of computing, and inspiring and educating future generations of scientists and technologists. For more information please visit: https://www.csail.mit.edu/

About STEMM Global 

STEMM Global is an ecosystem that includes a science-to-technology community of recognized experts in smart technologies, academic conferences, business-meets-academia events, R&D labs, and more. STEMM has established and organized more than a dozen science-to-industry summits worldwide.  For more information please visit:  https://stemm.tech

About Advancing Women in Product

Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with over 16,000 members dedicated to advancing the careers of women and underrepresented groups across the globe so they can become product and technical leaders. Focusing on skills-based workshops, advocacy and mentorship, AWIP actively addresses the gaps in management roles their members face when going from mid-senior and director level roles into executive positions.  AWIP has chapters in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Boston, and Chennai. For more information please visit: https://www.advancingwomeninproduct.org

Source: MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, STEMM Global