Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi

Professor Ghassemi led the Machine Learning for Health Group (University of Toronto) targets "Healthy ML", focusing on creating applying machine learning to understand and improve health.

We believe that health is important, and improvements in health improve lives. However, we still don't fundamentally understand what it means to be healthy, and the same patient may receive different treatments across different hospitals or clinicians as new evidence is discovered, or individual illness is interpreted. Health is unlike many success stories in machine learning so far - games like Go and self-driving cars -- because we do not have well-defined goals that can be used to learn rules. The nuance of health also requires that we keep machine learning models "healthy" -- working to ensure that they do not learn biased rules or detrimental recommendations.

Improving health requires targeting and evidence – the group tackles part of this puzzle with machine learning. There are many novel technical opportunities for machine learning in health challenges, and important progress to be made with careful application to domain.