Mihaela van der Schaar

Why medicine is creating exciting new frontiers for machine learning

Abstract

Medicine stands apart from other areas where machine learning can be applied. While we have seen advances in other fields with lots of data, it is not the volume of data that makes medicine so hard, it is the challenges arising from extracting actionable information from the complexity of the data. It is these challenges that make medicine the most exciting area for anyone who is really interested in the frontiers of machine learning – giving us real-world problems where the solutions are ones that are societally important and which potentially impact on us all. Think Covid 19! In this talk I will show how machine learning is transforming medicine and how medicine is driving new advances in machine learning, including new methodologies in automated machine learning, interpretable and explainable machine learning, and causal inference.

About the speaker

Mihaela van der Schaar is John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London. She has received the Oon Prize on Preventative Medicine from the University of Cambridge (2018) and was the recipient of an NSF Career Award. Her current research is focused on machine learning with applications to medicine, finance and education. Prior to her academic career, she was a Senior Researcher at Philips Research in the Netherlands and USA.