AI4Society Dialogues

Computer Vision is a field within artificial intelligence that is having significant impacts in medicine. Automated analysis of medical scan images can provide rich sources of insight and machine learning techniques to process this data open up a realm of possibilities for both researchers and clinicians. Dr. Nilanjan Ray is a leading researcher in computer vision, image analysis and visual recognition with deep learning. His current focus includes the application of cutting edge computer vision techniques to advance research in diabetes treatment. We talk about how he “accidentally” landed in this field, how computer vision works, the challenges of executing decision making using AI, how he is using generative adversarial networks to advance medical research (not for deep fakes!) and the role of technology in democratizing healthcare.
“In order to make that kind of (diabetes) treatment available...there is almost no choice but to use AI to bring the costs down to scale up (delivery)” – Nilanjan Ray
Dr. Nilanjan Ray is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta. His research is in computer vision, image analysis and visual recognition with deep learning. His work includes medical imaging and general computer vision applications including classification, recognition, semantic segmentation, object tracking, image registration and motion detection. Dr. Ray has served as General Co-chair for AI/GI/CRV conference in 2017, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2013-2017) and IET Image Processing (2016-), reviewer for NSERC DG and CRD grants.

Season two of AI4Society Dialogues is a co-production between two signature research areas at the University of Alberta, AI4Society and Precision Health.

Host: Katrina Ingram, Founder and CEO, Ethically Aligned AI
Technical Producer: Corey Stroeder
Special thanks to Kaly Vittala for research and production support.
Theme music: “Seeing the Future” by Dexter Britain

Dr. Eleni Stroulia, Professor, Computer Science and Director, AI4Society
Dr. Lawrence Richer, Vice Dean, Research, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Copyright 2021 University of Alberta. All rights reserved.

Some artists work with clay, or paint, but Dr. Marilène Oliver works with a digitized version of the human body. Her work explores the zeros and ones that we become when WE are rendered into data. Dr. Marilène Oliver is Assistant Professor of Visual Art at the University of Alberta. Her work is at the crossroads of new digital technologies, traditional print, and sculpture - producing objects that bridge the virtual and the real worlds. We talk about her inspiration for using medical scan data as raw material for artistic creation, the personal connections in her work through use of her own data and that of family members, biometric data and the role of our bodies in fuelling AI, her latest project that aims to bring “life” to a body of data to train and AI system, creating an ethics guidance for artistic creators and the tension she feels in seeing the harms of our current AI reality while hoping for a better future.

Find out more about Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality.

“I’ve just witnessed a really positive way that AI is changing a society (in the Faroe Islands) making it much more affluent...I see the evidence of how AI can be really positive. But in my work, I tend to be very cautious and anxious about AI. I worry that it’s a lot of control and focuses on things that mean we lose our humanity.” - Marilène Oliver

Dr. Marilène Oliver is an assistant professor of printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada. Dr. Oliver studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, London, UK where she obtained an MPhil with research project ‘Flesh to Pixel, Flesh to Voxel, Flesh to XYZ’. She has exhibited internationally in both private and public galleries including MassMoCA, Knoxville Museum of Art (USA) Frissarias Museum (Greece), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Fundació Sorigué (Spain) and The Glenbow Museum (Canada). Her work is held in a number of private collections around the world as well as a number of public collections such as The Wellcome Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum and Knoxville Museum of Art. In 2019 Dr. Oliver led and curated the exhibition Dyscorpia: Future Intersections of the Body and Technology and in 2020, the online exhibition Dyscorpia 2.1. She is also the host of LASERAlberta, a public series of art and science events and currently leads the research project ‘Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality’.

Season two of AI4Society Dialogues is a co-production between two signature research areas at the University of Alberta, AI4Society and Precision Health.

Host: Katrina Ingram, Founder and CEO, Ethically Aligned AI
Technical Producer: Corey Stroeder
Special thanks to Kaly Vittala for research and production support.
Theme music: “Seeing the Future” by Dexter Britain

Dr. Eleni Stroulia, Professor, Computer Science and Director, AI4Society
Dr. Lawrence Richer, Vice Dean, Research, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Copyright 2021 University of Alberta. All rights reserved.

Women are disproportionately affected by heart failure after heart attacks and underrepresented in clinical trials. This lack of medical data about women hinders our ability to really understand the impacts some medications have on women. Dr. Padma Kaul is working to change this.  We talk about her eclectic background that led to her work in epidemiology, why she’s passionate about women’s health and “getting the data”, her personal connection to her research focus on cardiovascular diseases, underrepresented groups in epidemiological studies and the

“Fewer women tend to be enrolled in clinical trials...my colleagues and I are trying to increase enrollment for women….the underrepresentation of women in general cardiology trials is a limitation. There’s been some research to suggest that because cardiology has been a male dominated field, maybe male physicians are more likely to enroll male patients….now everyone is aware that is something that needs to be fixed.” - Padma Kaul
Dr. Padma Kaul is an epidemiologist and a Professor in the Department of Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta. She is also co-director of the Canadian VIGOUR Centre, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Sex and Gender Science Chair in Diabetes and the Heart and Stroke Research in Cardiovascular research.

Season two of AI4Society Dialogues is a co-production between two signature research areas at the University of Alberta, AI4Society and Precision Health.

Host: Katrina Ingram, Founder and CEO, Ethically Aligned AI
Technical Producer: Corey Stroeder
Special thanks to Kaly Vittala for research and production support.
Theme music: “Seeing the Future” by Dexter Britain

Dr. Eleni Stroulia, Professor, Computer Science and Director, AI4Society
Dr. Lawrence Richer, Vice Dean, Research, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Copyright 2021 University of Alberta. All rights reserved.

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, in any given year, 1 in 5 people in Canada will personally experience a mental health problem or illness and by age 40, about 50% of the population will have or have had a mental illness. How might advances in precision health change how we address mental health problems? Dr. Bo “Cloud” Cao research interests include developing tools to enable personalized diagnosis and treatment for mental disorders, brain development and aging as well as neuromodulation and neurofeedback. We talk about the brain and the new, quantitative approaches to psychiatry made possible because of big data, the tools he’s developing to support the personalization of mental health treatments, the ethical use of data, how he addresses missing or lack of data in underrepresented populations and the importance of being part of an interdisciplinary team in order to develop real world solutions.

“Computational psychiatry...involves the use of more and more data from all modalities - imaging, genetics, medical records...all of this allow us to apply machine learning to the field of psychiatry. We can now investigate problems in new ways - it’s no longer just about doing one clinical trial.” - Bo “Cloud” Cao

Dr. Bo Cao is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair (CRC; Tier 2) in Computational Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Alberta (UAlberta). Trained in mathematics (BSc), psychology (MSc), computational neuroscience (PhD), neuroimaging and psychiatry (postdoc), Dr. Cao has a strong passion for understanding the fundamental mechanisms of how the brain works and how to cure the brain when the mechanisms are disturbed. Dr. Cao's main research interests are computational psychiatry and precision medicine in mental health, brain development and aging, general aging, and neuromodulation and neurofeedback.
Season two of AI4Society Dialogues is a co-production between two signature research areas at the University of Alberta, AI4Society and Precision Health.

Host: Katrina Ingram, Founder and CEO, Ethically Aligned AI
Technical Producer: Corey Stroeder
Special thanks to Kaly Vittala for research and production support.
Theme music: “Seeing the Future” by Dexter Britain

Dr. Eleni Stroulia, Professor, Computer Science and Director, AI4Society
Dr. Lawrence Richer, Vice Dean, Research, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Copyright 2021 University of Alberta. All rights reserved.

When we think about how artificial intelligence works, we often make comparisons to the human brain. Terms like neural networks seem to cement this connection. How much do computer models and the human brain have in common, especially when it comes to processing language? Dr. Alona Fyshe is a computer scientist with research interests that combine computational linguistics, machine learning and neuroscience. She draws on all of these areas to study the ways in which human brains and computer models process language. We talk about her journey from the arts to artificial intelligence, moving from industry to academia, women in AI, the remarkable ways in which human brains and computers represent concepts similarly and what this means for future work in this field and for the future of medicine.

“It’s very clear neural network models do not do the same thing the human brain does….but...two systems (the human brain and computers) “trained” on completely different data and for completely different prediction problems, show up with similar representations...I think that’s interesting and worth further exploration.” - Alona Fyshe

Dr. Alona Fyshe is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Computing Science and Psychology at the University of Alberta. She is a fellow of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and holds a CIFAR AI Chair. She received her BSc and MSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, and a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Fyshe uses machine learning to analyze brain images collected while people read, which allows her to study how humans represent the meaning they encounter in text, and how they combine words to understand higher-order meaning. She also studies how computers learn to represent meaning when trained on text or images.

Season two of AI4Society Dialogues is a co-production between two signature research areas at the University of Alberta, AI4Society and Precision Health.

Host: Katrina Ingram, Founder and CEO, Ethically Aligned AI
Technical Producer: Corey Stroeder
Special thanks to Kaly Vittala for research and production support.
Theme music: “Seeing the Future” by Dexter Britain

Dr. Eleni Stroulia, Professor, Computer Science and Director, AI4Society
Dr. Lawrence Richer, Vice Dean, Research, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Copyright 2021 University of Alberta. All rights reserved.

Sometimes, the most meaningful advances in technology are about enabling simple things which can have big impacts for a patient's quality of life. That’s what Dr. Jana Rieger has done. She’s invented a smart-enabled health tech device called Mobili-T that helps patients with something most of us probably take for granted - the ability to swallow. We talk about similarities in the creative process of research and writing a novel, how her research led to starting a company, why she chose to become an entrepreneur, how algorithms and machine learning plays into her work and why she feels “health at home” is the next big thing.

Find out more about True Angle and Mobili-T.

“I like having the open road, the null hypothesis...because you never know what you are going to find….Some of the best ideas come when you’ve left the research [itself] and are doing something else.” - Jana Rieger

Dr. Jana Rieger is a Professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine and Director of Research at the Institute for Reconstructive Sciences in Medicine at the University of Alberta. She’s also the CEO of Edmonton based True Angle Medical Technologies. Dr. Rieger is a global leader in functional outcomes assessment related to head and neck disorders. Over her 20-year career in this field, she has held roles as a professor, clinician, researcher, and most recently, entrepreneur.

Season two of AI4Society Dialogues is a co-production between two signature research areas at the University of Alberta, AI4Society and Precision Health.

Host: Katrina Ingram, Founder and CEO, Ethically Aligned AI
Technical Producer: Corey Stroeder
Special thanks to Kaly Vittala for research and production support.
Theme music: “Seeing the Future” by Dexter Britain

Dr. Eleni Stroulia, Professor, Computer Science and Director, AI4Society
Dr. Lawrence Richer, Vice Dean, Research, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
Copyright 2021 University of Alberta. All rights reserved.