The goal of the research roundtables is to foster discussion between the participants and senior researchers in the field on several topics of high relevance in the ML4H community. Each roundtable will have a small group of senior researchers and practitioners who are experts in the selected topics and a few junior chairs who will lead the discussion on open problems in ML4H which were crowdsourced from the community.
We will host in-person roundtables that will take place from 3:30-4:30 PM PST on December 15th and 12:30-1:30 PM PST on December 16th, 2024 during ML4H. The session will be split into two parts, with a 10 minutes break in the middle where participants can move to a different roundtable. Participants are encouraged to pick at most two roundtables that they would like to join and engage in the discussion points proposed by the junior chairs and ask further questions to the Senior Chair. To avoid the disruption of conversations, the participants should only move between roundtables during the break.
How do we effectively integrate multiple data sources (e.g., Electronic Health Records (EHRs), mHealth devices, images, genomics) for ML applications in healthcare? How does this work in a hospital in real time? How do we assess the safety, effectiveness, and trustworthiness of foundation models for health applications? What are some low-hanging fruit opportunities to use large language models in healthcare?
Senior Chair: Jason Fries (Stanford)
Junior Chairs: Maxwell Xu (UIUC), Hejie Cui (Stanford)
How can recent advances in AI/ML help discover causal relations using clinical data? To what extent can we use observational data to emulate randomized trials, to evaluate the causal effect of any treatment?
Senior Chair: Rahul G. Krishnan (U of Toronto)
Junior Chairs: Johnny Xi (UBC), Trenton Chang (UMich)
Doctors and AI experts need to work together to develop Health AI. How can such collaborations form? What is expected from collaborations to make them successful?
Senior Chair: Dennis Shung (Yale)
Junior Chairs: Vicky Bikia (Stanford), Nicole Zhang (McGill)
How do we decide whether deploying and maintaining an AI or ML model is cost-effective? Who should pay for AI models?
Senior Chair: Ian Cromwell (Unaffiliated Health Economist)
Junior Chairs: Shuvom Sadhuka (MIT), Ross Duncan (SFU)
What level of evidence is required to decide to deploy or retire a model? How do emerging governance structures for AI deployment in hospitals (e.g., Chief AI officer) help these efforts?
Senior Chair: Adarsh Subbaswamy (FDA)
Junior Chairs: Elizabeth Healey (MIT), Ayush Noori (Harvard)
How can we create incentives for institutions to release healthcare datasets for public use? What obstacles are there for releasing health datasets for public use, and how can we mitigate potential obstacles?
Senior Chair: Rahmat Beheshti (U of Delaware)
Junior Chairs: John Wu (UIUC), Adibvafa Fallahpour (U of Toronto)
What are the unique challenges and opportunities of AI in low- and middle-income countries? How can AI be adapted to meet such challenges?
Senior Chair: Megan Coffee (NYU/Columbia)
Junior Chairs: Wenqian Ye (UVA), Brighton Nuwagira (UT-Dallas)
How could we become a better reviewer for ML4H? What lessons have we learned serving as a reviewer for interdisciplinary peer-review conferences?
Senior Chair: Stephen Pfohl (Google Research)
Junior Chair: Fabian Gröger (University of Basel)
Do clinicians and computer scientists have the same understanding of algorithmic bias and fairness? What are the best practices for continuous evaluation of deployed models? Do foundation models pose a challenge to the assessment of fairness and bias?
Senior Chair: Leo Celi (MIT)
Junior Chairs: Alina Peluso (ORNL), Amin Adibi (UBC)
How can we understand how models are affecting clinical decisions or clinical processes? What is the current state of clinician-AI interaction research in health AI?
Senior Chair: Shannon McWeeney (OHSU)
Junior Chairs: Yuan Pu (Yale), Shannon Shen (MIT)
How can LLMs and Foundation Models be leveraged to accelerate the identification of potential drug candidates, and what are the challenges in optimizing the drug development pipeline using deep learning models?
Senior Chair: Michael Craig (Valence)
Junior Chairs: Zuheng (David) Xu (UBC), Geoffrey Woollard (UBC)
Social communication has a direct role in mental health and developmental conditions such as autism. How can we leverage advances in Social AI (Egocentric Vision, LLMs) to devise new ways to diagnose and treat mental and physical health conditions and improve outcomes?
Senior Chair: James M. Rehg (UIUC)
Junior Chairs: Yurui Cao (UIUC), Yuwei Zhang (University of Cambridge)
Where do we stand with ML’s role in population health? How can ML be applied for time-to-event survival analysis?
Senior Chair: Ehsan Karim (UBC)
Junior Chairs: Belal Hossain (UBC), Hanna Frank (UBC)
How can machine learning models effectively capture patient heterogeneity while ensuring personalized treatment recommendations? What are the key challenges in balancing personalization with the generalizability of solutions?
Senior Chair: Mohsen Sadatsafavi (UBC)
Junior Chairs: Lily Xia (UBC), Sazan Mahbub (CMU)
What publication venues should I look for when I want to write about interdisciplinary research? What did you learn from the mentorship program? How did it vary across mentors and mentees? What are ways to facilitate research collaborations across people with a medical background and people with a stats/computer science background? How can the author mentorship program be improved? How can we write to communicate a result to an interdisciplinary audience? How can we facilitate author mentorship within a university/company?
Senior Chair: Charles Delahunt (Global Health Labs)
Junior Chair: Lizzie Remfry (Queen Mary University)
What are the key aspects of career mentorship in academia and industry? Can you share perspectives on professional development in these environments? Have the chair open by sharing one of their experiences in building professional relationships. What does networking, collaboration, and building professional relationships look like in academia and industry? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in ML4H? How often do you need to pivot directions in the industry?
Senior Chairs: Elise Jortberg (JnJ), Samaneh Nasiri (Emory)
Junior Chair: Naveen Raman (CMU)
