Tag: ai

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Preprint Announcement – AI in Medicine Product Development Framework

Working in industrial research is usually very motivating but occasionally it is also frustrating. You’ve just done something really cool but you’re not allowed to tell anybody outside the company about it. Indeed, in a small company there might not be anybody inside of the company who can even appreciate it!

I have worked on roughly 4 really cool projects since leaving academia at the end of 2017. And apart from some basic mentions in my blog (e.g. here and here) most of what I have done has been known only to a few key stakeholders.

Since leaving Fosanis last September I have had a visiting researcher affiliation at the Digital Health Accelerator of the Berlin Institute of Health. I have used my time to mentor a cohort of teams attempting to spin out their ideas; to work on a causal inference project; and, to write a paper about the structural aspects of medical AI products. This week, along with my co-author Vince Madai, we submitted that paper.

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ML Embeddings and the Neuronal Code

I had the opportunity to talk recently with a relatively advanced researcher in machine learning methods. The conversation turned briefly to the study of embeddings when he mentioned that most of his work involves things that can be embedded in Euclidean space. Since I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking about embeddings recently, I asked him some questions to get the official ML take on the subject. I was resonably gratified to learn that – although most ML engineers don’t think much about embeddings – the research on this topic considers the embedding to be tightly bound to the network architecture. It is not possible to study abstract embeddings, divorced from applications. I fully agree with this point-of-view.

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RCTs vs Real-World Evidence for medical AI

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have been the gold standard for statistical evidence, of treatment effect, for over 100 years. Their strength is in their attempt to avoid major sources of bias in a comparison of the evidence. However, they are costly to run, particularly in the domain of personalised medicine, to which medical AI products typically belong.

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Causality and the Scientific Method

I have a short thought, stemming from a combination of projects that I’m working on at the moment, and I want to share it.

The current trend towards Causality in AI is very attractive to people like me. It matches our personal biases and views of the world. However, it is lacking a natural heuristic. How do we decide how much resources to devote to alternative models of the world, as we gather evidence as to their accuracy?

Like I say, I have a number of parallel projects, many of which address exactly this question on technical and biological levels.

Effectual entrepreneurship takes place in situations of high uncertainty and low knowledge. As uncertainty decreases, planning and management take over.

There is something from the world of business, studying entrepreneurship, which might be a better heuristic than any normative model I can come up with. Effectual entrepreneurship is a perspective on entrepreneurship, studying highly successful repeat entrepreneurs (eg. Elon Musk), which establishes control, rather than planning, at the core of entrepreneurial activities.

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Build – Test – Move

First a mea culpa, I have a huge backlog of relatively heavy articles that I really want to add to the blog. But I’ve been busy getting married – congratulations to me – and I didn’t have enough time. I strongly believe in following relatively strict guidelines on writing and editing articles, where I set myself deadlines and avoid over-writing on topics – it is just a blog after all – but for deep insights I do also have a minimum standard that I want to be able to produce before I’m willing to hit the Publish button.

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