What follows is an excerpt from a book I was writing on Causality in 2020. I eventually abandoned the manuscript as the software ecosystem was not mature enough to fold all of causality into 1-2 tools. Recently I took out the manuscript again, to share some basic insights with a colleague, and I realised that it would also make sense to share an extract here.
Continue reading “The Counterfactual Revolution”Autumn Reading List
I developed a Reading List in Autumn 2021 to educate people about AI in Healthcare. As an aid to navigating a selection of my blog posts, here is the complete reading list:
- Translation in medical AI.
- Building a medical AI product (product development framework).
- Bioinformatics business models.
- Predictive Models.
- Regulating AI in Medical Products (OnRAMP).
- Leadership / managing people.
- Data science in biomedical industry.
- Pharma’s data problem.
- Knowledge worker operating manual.
- Personalised medicine, what is it?
- RCT vs RWE.
- AI in Healthcare 101.
- 5 big challenges facing medical AI.
- Differentiation.
- Math and Bio 2.0.
This list is thematically coherent and should give you a good starting point for exploring this blog.
December 2023 update
I stopped posting updates to this blog almost one year ago. At the time, I was deeply involved in producing yet another academic paper (It’s out!) and we had just had our second child.
I still like the process of writing my ideas and sharing them with others. But the process has become too time consuming. And, sadly, the payoff in a noisy world is pretty thin.
Having some experience of the whole key-opinion-leader (KOL) process I don’t think that I’m ever going to be very successful on that path.
Decisions
Three key decisions are relevant for the current post
- Commission somebody to redesign this site. I need to make it more navigable, so that you the reader can access the more relevant posts on your first visit.
- Post considerably less frequently. Yes I will begin to write again, but the articles will only be posted after the redesign.
- Display a thread of some of my most relevant articles as a first contact point for the interim. (Coming next week).
About me
I am still a life-sciences and technology founder. I still prefer the technical rather than business role, although I frequently do both albeit rarely at the same time. I came very close to founding a Software-as-a-InVitro-Diagnostic (SaIVD) company in 2023, unfortunately our hopes did not come to fruition. I earn my income from advising others on Team, Architecture and Build. Mostly I get paid to solve serious problems. I also do due diligence for investors.
Why the innovation snippets?
For six months now, I have been producing an innovation snippets series.
I know I have some email subscribers who have been surprised at my output in the past six month (Hi Ronan!). Partly, it was surprising that I chose to publish on this topic given my time commitments elsewhere, and partly it was surprising as I tend to have a much stronger interest in heavy technical questions and a focus on product-market fit in healthcare.
I have spent the past five plus years deeply involved in medical innovation. My first startup was in pharma R&D, and my second was an innovative approach to delivering behavioural therapy to oncology patients. Since leaving Fosanis, I have spent over three years publishing academic articles on how to do medical AI products, and in mentoring a rather large number of startups working in this space.
I realise that I do not want to become a lifelong coach. Nor am I likely to publish a book on entrepreneurship. But I have been systematically gathering my insights over these past years and if the opportunity ever presents I do intend to publish them – that is just not my principal path.
In June 2022 I accepted a full time job for the first time in my career. Part of that role might have required me to develop content for courses on innovation in AI. Prior to beginning in that role I was faced with the obvious problem – I have a lot of content ready to go, I was not hired on the basis of having that content, indeed my employer did not even know that I had it at the point where they hired me, so how do I maintain ownership here?
We came up with an internal process for handling this issue. But my backstop solution was to publish the insights in their rawest form here on my blog. I typed them all up prior to taking up my employment and programmed their subsequent appearance according to a weekly publishing schedule.
What next?
I like the insights, but I dislike what they are doing to my blog.
I use this domain as my principal domain for my professional life and this is lowering my value. It is hiding that I am actually a technical expert who, in addition, works well with humans.
I will revert to publishing on more concrete topics. But I am bandwidth limited so, as a consequence, I will be forced to publish less often.
If it does not make the blog look bad then I will continue to intersperse innovation insights when time and space allow.
Writing is tiring
I have been writing a lot in the past 12 months and most of it has not appeared on this blog. My output on the blog is reduced as a result but this is normal. Writing is tiring.
About 18 months ago I left my second start-up Fosanis, slightly burnt-out and paradoxically highly-motivated.
Continue reading “Writing is tiring”2020 coming to an end
The past two end-of-years I have wanted to write a bilan de l’année. Both years were incredibly exciting and I had a lot to look back on. In both cases I wrote the notes for myself but never published them on the site. I guess that, while it is both useful and healthy to keep a monitor of how things have gone, I am not so keen on going public on these topics.
2020 has been a particularly unusual year. I am not excited about what I did this year. But I have to admit that this year, despite the obvious difficulties, brought a welcome return to modes of work which agree with me and, frankly, a blistering level of productivity.
Continue reading “2020 coming to an end”New article: My experience of the BIA Pulse accelerator
I wrote recently about my experiences of the Pulse leadership and entrepreneurship training program for the blog of the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA). The Pulse course is organised jointly by the BIA and the Francis Crick Institute. I joined the three-day course, in its first year of operation, in 2018.
I felt that I benefited enormously from the course. I had left my postdoc position 3 months previously and I was researching ideas for setting-up a company. I subsequently took my learnings from Pulse and elsewhere, and established my first company Simmunology. So when I was contacted earlier this year I was particularly keen to write something and say thanks.
Continue reading “New article: My experience of the BIA Pulse accelerator”New hosting
I have had to move my website hosting this week. I was hosted by the computer society at National University of Ireland, Galway for many years. Their hardware is now on its last legs and the building it is hosted in has been turned into a field hospital for Covid patients. It was time to move on.
Many thanks to Compsoc at NUI Galway for the years of hosting.
Covid strikes!
I had a very different article queued to be published today. However my server was taken offline for 10 days partly due to the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading “Covid strikes!”Writing quickly
Every blog I read eventually contains a post about i) navigating the blog, and ii) the author’s policy on writing. Consider this my attempt at the latter.
I have mentioned before that I find that writing benefits my long-term thought processes. It is meditative. I am forced to formalise my thoughts and chase-up loose ends. I have never considered myself to be good at writing – I failed English in school – but I find my confidence growing as I get older.
Continue reading “Writing quickly”