Author: Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health<\/p>\n
Should artificial intelligence be allowed to make care decisions for patients? Though the future of AI may conjure up doomsday visions of robots and computers intent on rendering human existence superfluous, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) addressed questions surrounding the use of AI in health through their inaugural summer program focused on educating high school students.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Jameel Clinic Summer Program<\/a>, which took place July 10-21, accepted a total of 51 students from primarily Boston-area schools, with a commitment to reaching students from diverse backgrounds.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The program, which split students up into two cohorts of 25 students for each week, had core offerings including courses like \u201cIntro to Python,\u201d \u201cIntro to Clinical AI,\u201d and \u201cIntro to Drug Discovery\u201d while also facilitating trips to various local institutions such as the Museum of Science Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Amgen.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOrganizing this boot camp had a personal significance to me. When my family immigrated to Israel, it was tough \u2014 my parents and I worked minimum wage jobs to survive,\u201d School of Engineering Distinguished Professor and Jameel Clinic AI faculty lead Regina Barzilay recalls. \u201cGoing to university transformed my life. Many of the students in the program have similar backgrounds. I hope that exposing them to exciting science at MIT will open new opportunities for them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not supposed to be here today,\u201d stated Collin Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor at MIT and Jameel Clinic principal investigator, on becoming both a computer scientist and cardiologist. In his lecture, Stultz spoke of the hardships his parents endured after immigrating to New York from Jamaica. He emphasized that he and his family members had never thought to apply to schools like Harvard University, thinking of it as a school for \u201cpeople like the Kennedys\u201d until Stultz got the idea to apply from a classmate who was planning to apply.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt is my hope that the interactions between students in the Jameel Clinic Summer Program and MIT faculty will highlight the wealth of opportunities available at the intersection of computer science and medicine,\u201d Stultz says.\u00a0<\/p>\n As a result of a generous gift from Joseph Bates and Kristin Loeffler through their AI for Humanity Foundation, the Jameel Clinic was able to offer the summer program at no cost and reduce the financial barriers for students from under-resourced backgrounds. Bates shared that at the age of\u00a013 he was discovered by a\u00a0psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University and became the first teenager to enter the university. \u201cI had been doing an adequate, but not good, job in a dangerous Baltimore City public junior high school,\u201d Bates says. \u201cBeing at Hopkins was wonderful, socially and intellectually, and it led me to a computer science\u00a0PhD at Cornell University, then CS\u00a0professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Someone taking an interest really mattered, and it changed my life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n According to the National Science Foundation<\/a>, the U.S. STEM workforce gradually diversified between 2011 and 2021, with increased representation of women and underrepresented students of color. But in the college-educated workforce, a 2021 report showed that just 16 percent of engineers were women and 16 percent of underrepresented students of color \u2014 Hispanic, Black, and American Indian or Indigenous Alaskan individuals \u2014 were employed in science and engineering occupations with at least a bachelor\u2019s degree.\u00a0<\/p>\n Angely Mejia Martinez, a rising junior at Chelsea High School and aspiring doctor, highlighted Jameel Clinic chair and MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp\u2019s talk as one of her favorites. Sharp spoke about growing up on a small farm in rural Kentucky before setting off on his career in science, which eventually led to his 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. \u201cI really got inspired by that because when I was little, many people would say \u2018I don\u2019t think you can do this,\u2019 and I was always like \u2018I can do this,\u2019\u201d Martinez says. \u201cI think I can achieve anything I set my mind into.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very surreal because I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d be here,\u201d Priyani Rawal, a rising junior studying information technology at Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School, says. Rawal\u2019s favorite class was Barzilay\u2019s Intro to AI\/ML lecture. \u201cI was so amazed by what we were learning … it made me inspired to go into [the machine learning] field.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Adam Nouri, a rising senior at Pioneer Charter School II, signed up for the program after receiving an email from his computer science teacher. Before applying, Nouri had considered enrolling in a summer course for programming at Bunker Hill Community College, an option typically offered at no cost to Pioneer students. However, Nouri quickly realized that free enrollment was only available during the school year and says it would have cost around $800 for him to enroll in the summer. If he hadn\u2019t gotten into the Jameel Clinic Summer Program, Nouri believes he would have continued working at his part-time service job for the rest of the summer while trying to code a game or build a computer with his friends in his free time. \u201cWhen I got into the [Jameel Clinic Summer Program], I was actually really excited,\u201d Nouri recalls. \u201cNow I feel like I have a clearer path I want to pursue.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As part of their final group project presentations given on the last day of the program, students were assigned AI tools used in clinical settings or drug discovery, like PathAI or AlphaFold2, and asked to explain their assigned tool along with its potential benefits and risks to a target audience of their choice.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a heavy emphasis placed not only on innovation in science, health care and technology, but also on collaboration across disciplines,\u201d Jay Ananth, a rising junior at Troy High School, says. \u201cDuring the summer program, I was taught AI and health care not as a high school student, but as a peer \u2014 a fellow researcher \u2014 who has the ability to innovate and make a change.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Serena Hu, a rising junior at Lincoln Sudbury High School, felt less uncertainty about her future after attending the program. \u201cI always wanted to try new things so that I could find something that I love to do, but I can pretty confidently say that I found it here,\u201d Hu says. \u201cThey\u2019re not just teaching you the material \u2014 they\u2019re also inspiring you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The Jameel Clinic Summer Program was organized by Ignacio Fuentes, Alex Ouyang, and Marinalva Smith. Maggie Wang, Antonella Catanzaro, and Ciarra Brodie helped to oversee and contribute to the success of the program. Instructors included Pulkit Agrawal, Sharifa Alghowinem, Shrooq Alsenan, Manisha Bahl, Regina Barzilay, Rebecca Boiarsky, Felix Faltings, Florian Fintelmann, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Susan Hockfield, Insoo Hyun, Noah Jones, Ila Kumar, Peter Mikhael, Carles Monterrubio,\u00a0Tiffany Pereira Portela, Phillip Sharp, Hannes St\u00e4rk, Vinith Suriyakumar, Oliver Thiel, Randi Williams, Jeremy Wohlwend, and Rachel Wu.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"