100 Women in AI

When MIT professor Regina Barzilay was diagnosed with breast cancer, she discovered that almost none of the AI she’d spent her career building was being used to care for patients like her. At the height of her career in natural language processing, she walked away to start over in a field with no funding, no name, and every grant application rejected.

In this conversation, Cheraé Robinson talks with Regina about watching AI go from a field built on grammar rules to the breakthroughs we see today, the decade it took to bring her breast cancer prediction model Mirai into national screening guidelines and her own hospital, and the new tools she’s building to help patients with lung cancer and metastatic disease. She also opens up about failure, patience, and learning to be gentler with herself, and why the real stories behind breakthroughs matter more than the polished ones.

Chapters

 (00:00) Can AI see cancer before it appears?
 (00:25) Meet Regina Barzilay
 (01:30) Studying language processing before ChatGPT
 (05:43) Why even experts can’t predict where AI goes next
 (07:06) A breast cancer diagnosis and a change of direction
 (11:26) Starting over with no funding and no name in the field
 (17:45) Fighting for access to hospital data
 (22:23) The idea behind Mirai
 (24:39) Getting Mirai into national cancer screening guidelines
 (26:13) Why medicine moves slower than computer science
 (29:03) Sybil and the changing face of lung cancer
 (31:49) Using AI to personalize treatment for metastatic cancer
 (37:28) Failure, patience and being gentle with yourself
 (40:17) The women who inspire her

Resources mentioned

• MIT Jameel Clinic: https://jclinic.mit.edu
• Mirai breast cancer risk model (open source): https://github.com/yala/Mirai
• Sybil lung cancer risk model: https://github.com/reginabarzilaygroup/Sybil
• NCCN cancer screening guidelines: https://www.nccn.org
• ARPA-H: https://arpa-h.gov

People mentioned

Regina Barzilay, Adam Yala, Klavs Jensen, Dr. Lecia Sequist, Linda Griffith, Dina Katabi

About the show

100 Women in AI features conversations with the honorees of the 100 Women in AI list from Flybridge and XFactor Ventures. If this episode moved you, follow the show and leave a rating or review to help more people find these stories. Learn more at www.100womeninai.com and follow along at instagram.com/100womeninai.

A first listen to 100 Women in AI, where host Cheraé Robinson talks with the women shaping the biggest technological shift of our lifetimes about how they got here and where they think AI is headed. Follow now so you don’t miss the first episode.