Keynote Presentation:
“The Present and Future of Health AI: Mitigating Dangers While Maximizing Benefits for All“
Artificial Intelligence had the potential to transform life as we know and is taking many fields by storm. Its consequences, both opportunities and risks, might be most pronounced in human health. On the one hand, AI algorithms can aid detection of new cures and therapies, diagnose and predict future disease much faster than current practice and bring healthcare to parts of the country and world that suffer from the lack of access. One the other hand, if not deployed responsibly, with strict adherence to the highest ethical standards, AI can de-humanize or trans-humanize health and medicine and put most vulnerable members of society at further risk and disadvantage.
In this presentation we explore grounding principles that can guide responsible development and implementation of AI in health. Starting with the assumption that AI needs to serve the human person, we are argue for intentional governance grounded in quality, safety and transparency while at the same time promoting continued progress and innovation. We present emerging positive examples of responsible AI governance and point to future directions and areas of focus.
About the Speaker:
Michael J. Pencina, PhD, is Duke Health’s chief data scientist and serves as vice dean for data science, director of Duke AI Health, and professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at the Duke University School of Medicine. His work bridges the fields of data science, health care, and AI, and contributes to Duke’s national leadership in responsible health AI.
Pencina partners with key leaders to develop data science strategies for Duke Health that span and connect academic research and clinical care. As vice dean for data science, he develops and implements quantitative science strategies to support the School of Medicine’s missions in education and training, laboratory and clinical science, and data science. He co-founded and co-leads the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), a national, multi-stakeholder effort whose mission is to increase trustworthiness of AI by developing guidelines to drive high-quality health care through the implementation of innovative, credible, and transparent health AI systems. Pencina serves in a leadership capacity for the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network (TRAIN), an organization Duke co-founded with leading health care and technology organizations to develop tools and technologies that promote the adoption of high quality, novel, and safe health AI solutions for patient care and research. He spearheaded establishing and cochairs Duke Health’s Algorithm-Based Clinical Decision Support (ABCDS) Oversight Committee.
Pencina is an internationally recognized authority in the evaluation of AI algorithms. Guideline groups rely on his work to advance best practices for the application of clinical decision support tools in health delivery. He interacts frequently with investigators from academic and industry institutions as well as government officials.
Since 2014, Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics has regularly recognized Pencina as one of the world’s “highly cited researchers” in clinical medicine and social sciences, with more than 400 publications cited over 100,000 times. He serves as a deputy editor for statistics at JAMA-Cardiology.
Pencina joined the Duke University faculty in 2013 and served as director of biostatistics for the Duke Clinical Research Institute until 2018. Previously, he was an associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Boston University and the Framingham Heart Study, and director of statistical consulting at the Harvard Clinical Research Institute. He received his PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from Boston University in 2003 and holds master’s degrees from the University of Warsaw in actuarial mathematics and business culture.