Converting biologists, one step at a time.
I hate hearing my own voice on tape. It’s even more painful to see myself being interviewed. But I have decided to own this one.
I mentor digital health projects at the Berlin Institute of Health. I specialise in AI, pharma, and behavioural products. The video is highly edited, but I still own it.
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.
Continue reading “RCTs vs Real-World Evidence for medical AI”I have been invited to speak at the Dynamics of Immune Responses workshop/seminar/conference in May-June 2020. The invitation arose through my previous efforts to found a company in this space.
There is a growing awareness in the field of immunology of the potential for using mathematical techniques. The wedge-issue here is the cascade of data appearing via new cytometry techniques; large-data looks like a math issue to most people. I of course come from the other side of a spectrum – everything looks like a math issue to me – I wanted to stimulate drug development which engages with immune system dynamics by founding my company.
Continue reading “Invited Speaker: Dynamics of Immune Responses”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.
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.
Continue reading “Causality and the Scientific Method”I am beginning a new project this week, the topic is Causal Inference. This is something I have been reading about, and wrestling with, for quite some time. Now seems a good point to take some time out, form a project, and see what I can get done on the topic.
Continue reading “New Project: Causal Inference”Today is my last official day under contract to Fosanis GmbH. I had my first encounter with the founders following my talk at the Digital Health Forum in March 2018. Following that initial meeting I became an advisor, writing a major funding proposal, bringing scientific techniques to the core of the product. In November 2018, following the closure of my own company, I became a full-time member of staff – as Head of Data Science – and led the project on the basis of the ideas contained in my funding proposal.
Continue reading “Closing a Chapter @ Fosanis”I sometimes see myself as a slow learner. I am extremely fast at deep-thinking, which somewhat disguises this fact, but I learn things from the ground up. Until I can think a topic through I sometimes feel unsure about operating from an incomplete understanding.
When I worked in academia I prefered to learn rather than to force my opinions on others. Everybody seemed reasonably smart, and they were absolutely convinced of their own correctness, and so I listened and learned. Continue reading “Why I write”
This topic occurred to me following my recent talk at a dental conference at Charité Berlin. Upon hearing that I have a strong interest in inference, my fellow keynote mentioned that it drives him crazy that random forests, and similar algorithms, work so much better than DNNs on genomic data. He challenged me to come up with a reason for why this is the case.
I think that I know why. The problem I have is that I suspect that I can never prove it. That issue of not being able to prove things in machine learning is probably an equally interesting topic, for a future article, but here I want to address my theory of why random forests work better than DNNs for analysing genome data.
Continue reading “Why do Trees work better than DNNs on genome data?”A sense of home is a powerful feeling. The sense of belonging, of knowing where everything is. I miss that sometimes.
I left Ireland almost exactly 10 years ago with a burning need to go out and prove myself. I had finally recovered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and was going to take up a much delayed PhD position. I moved to the University of Luebeck, where I found my introduction to neuroscience, before moving on to Paris Descartes, the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Chicago. With each move I developed a new network of colleagues, collaborators, and mentors.
A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a member of the Irish mathematical community. Many years ago I wrote the website for the Mathematics Department at NUI, Galway. While doing that I included biographies of the then members of staff and their research domains. At some point, I also made a backup of the website for my own reference under my personal domain. Sadly, many of the members of staff who worked at NUI, Galway when I was an undergraduate are now dead. So now this resource has become a useful archive. And thus I was re-discovered by a member of the current Irish mathematical community.
Continue reading “The network you grow up with”18 months ago I left my academic nest to see what I could discover in the wider world. Here is what I learned.
Continue reading “Lessons Learned”