The Human Impact of Machine Learning in Medical Diagnostics & More

In January, UC San Diego announced that a group of scientists had succeeded in training a computer to tell the difference between a person with a “healthy” intestine from someone with inflammatory bowel disease by analyzing the genetic makeup of the microbes in their gut.

Less than two weeks later, scientists at Stanford University said they also had created an artificial intelligence algorithm that could diagnose skin cancer as accurately as a panel of 21 board-certified dermatologists.

These recent advances suggest we are on the verge of some major innovations in the use of machine learning for medical diagnoses. Think what it would mean, for example, if you could use your smartphone to take a photo of a worrisome mole and send the image in to be remotely analyzed by a computer system.

Want more AI, machine learning, and drug discovery content? Network and engage with industry leaders online this June. Learn more.

The Xconomy Forum on the Human Impact of Innovation, set for next Wednesday, April 19, at the Alexandria at Torrey Pines, was organized to highlight innovations that are expected to bring transformational change to how we live our lives. We’re bringing experts to the stage in everything from self-driving cars to precision medicine.

Something interesting happened, though, in the process of identifying major innovations and recruiting speakers for this afternoon conference: “Machine learning” emerged as a recurring theme in many of the talks.

Our leadoff speaker is Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. In recent years, Smarr has moved to the forefront in the emerging field of “quantified health” and with Rob Knight, director of the UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation, Smarr has been driving much of the research in the use of machine learning to recognize the unique characteristics of the microbiome in a sick gut.

Another speaker, former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin (who is the founding CEO of the San Diego neural computing company KnuEdge) plans to talk about the coming “tidal wave” of machine intelligence—and the massive disruption he expects it to bring.

Our goal is to explain how these changes are creating new opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators in both technology and the life sciences, and to highlight San Diego’s role in the advance of these innovations.

In addition to Smarr and Goldin, our lineup of speakers includes:

—Mary Lou Jepsen, founder, Openwater; former Director of Engineering, Facebook/Oculus

—Henrik Christensen, Director, UCSD Institute for Contextual Robotics

—Jeff Hawkins, VP on Reproductive and Genetic Health, Illumina

—Clayton Lewis, Co-founder & CEO, Seattle-based Arivale

—Jay Lichter, Managing Director, Avalon Ventures Partner

—Steven Steinhubl, Professor, Scripps Translational Science Institute

—Sandeep Pandya, President, NetraDyne

—Patryk Laurent, director of AI engineering, LeEco

—Paul Banks, President, TetraVue

—Urs Köster, Senior Algorithm Engineer, Intel/Nervana Systems

—Chris Borroni-Bird, VP of Strategic Development, Qualcomm

You can find our agenda for the Xconomy Forum on the Human Impact of Innovation here, and register to attend here. I hope to see you there!

 

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.