Science at AI Speed: Towards a Biomedical Air Traffic Control System

It's nice to know what your specific calling is, and to be able to describe it in one short phrase. Mine is: Help scientists do science efficiently. Two years ago, in this very forum, I talked about helping oncologists individualize cancer treatments based upon individual patients' molecular profiles. Back then I had a sense of how to do this, but few details. Now, however, although we haven't solved every technical detail, I can almost give you a line-by-line algorithm. Unfortunately, to implement this algorithm requires solving an enormous socio-technical problem that amounts to building a huge human-machine system, not unlike the Air Traffic Control System, but where theories are being flown around instead of people. In this presentation I'll briefly recap the goal and describe the algorithm, but I'll spend most of the presentation on the socio-technical problem, because if we solve it, science is going to be being done in a whole new way!

Speaker: Jeff Shrager, Stanford

Room 126