21 episodes

AI4Society Dialogues is a new podcast that takes you behind the scenes to meet some of the talented researchers who are constructing and using AI in ways that will shape our world.

AI4Society Dialogues AI4Society

    • Education
    • 5.0 • 1 Rating

AI4Society Dialogues is a new podcast that takes you behind the scenes to meet some of the talented researchers who are constructing and using AI in ways that will shape our world.

    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E7 - Social robots and assistive technologies

    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E7 - Social robots and assistive technologies

    As advances are made in artificial intelligence, questions are being raised about how we should relate to AI, especially when it’s embodied intelligence. In other words – how will we relate to robots? Dr. Adriana Ríos Rincón is a researcher who uses robots in her work with children. We talk about her thoughts on artificial intelligence, the importance of play in her research (and what she does for fun), how AI intersects with assistive technologies and her work to democratize access to these technologies and the role of robots in care.
    “AI can potentially help rehabilitation professionals detect early stages of cognitive decline that precedes dementia in older adults. Using alternative means such as playing video games may be more interesting or engaging for older adults than the application of standardized screening tools and can be used for monitoring cognitive status in a playful way.” – Adriana Ríos Rincón
    Dr. Adriana Ríos Rincón is Assistant Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Alberta. Her current research is devoted to investigating the use of assistive technologies to assess and promote cognitive skills and engagement in play in individuals with disabilities, mainly those with motor and cognitive impairment including those living with dementia. She is also interested in exploring the use of information and communication technologies and artificial intelligence to support decisions about transitions across the continuum of care in older adults and individuals with disabilities.

    • 50 min
    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E6 - Envisioning medical scan data as the 21st century stethoscope

    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E6 - Envisioning medical scan data as the 21st century stethoscope

    A stethoscope is a functional device, used to examine a patient…but it’s also become an enduring symbol for the use of technology in patient care. Yet…when it comes to advances in technology – what might a new, 21st century stethoscope look like? Dr. Jacob Jaremko believes that with AI enabled technology, we can transform medical imaging at the point of care.  We talk about his thoughts on artificial intelligence in the context of medicine, his journey from an undergrad civil engineer to medical student to the world of artificial neural networks, what he’s learned in becoming an entrepreneur and thoughts on healthcare data, AI and ethics.
    “Diversity is absolutely crucial to innovation. The way to produce innovation most reliably and effectively is to take smart people from different backgrounds and put them together in a room to solve a problem…everyone sees it differently…and new ideas come out of that. ” – Jacob Jaremko
    Dr. Jacob Jaremko is a pediatric musculoskeletal radiologist, who is an Associate Professor and AHS Endowed Chair in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Alberta. He’s also a Canada AI Chair and CIFAR fellow. Dr. Jaremko has been working with artificial intelligence since 1999, completing his PhD thesis in biomedical engineering. More recently, he co-founded MEDO, one of Alberta’s most promising health tech startups.

    • 35 min
    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E4 - Predicting cancer to drive early interventions

    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E4 - Predicting cancer to drive early interventions

    What if we had better ways to predict cancer and a tailored plan to intervene early in the process? Dr. Adam Kinnaird is conducting leading edge research in the area of prostate cancer, which affects 1 in 7 men in Canada throughout their life. We talk about his research into early interventions in cancer, why prostate cancer is so hard to diagnose, using AI/ML techniques in precision diagnostics, surgical robots, interdisciplinary research collaboration and why he’s excited about the future of precision medicine.
    “Prostate cancer is a spectrum, [from low to high risk]…my particular research looks at the patient population for low risk prostate cancer…and doing active surveillance. We’re trying to better risk stratify men…we are using advanced imaging techniques, MRI and micro-ultrasound …as well as next generation genetic sequencing… We’re trying to come up with a composite risk score at the individual patient level.” – Adam Kinnaird
    Dr. Adam Kinnaird is Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, surgery department, at the University of Alberta. He is a urological surgeon and graduated as a Vanier Scholar with the Governor General’s Gold Medal at the University of Alberta.  Dr. Kinnaird is an award-winning researcher and recently completed an international fellowship at UCLA.

    • 35 min
    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E3 - Data, Virtual Care and Precision Health

    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E3 - Data, Virtual Care and Precision Health

    Advances in digital innovation, including artificial intelligence, are rapidly changing the face of both healthcare research and the delivery of care. In his work as a clinician, professor and researcher, Dr. Daniel Baumgart is working to advance precision medicine on all of these fronts. We talk about his early interest in computers, why he chose to pursue an MBA in addition to his medical background, his research on Crohn’s disease and his recent work on virtual care, why Alberta can play a leading role in digital health innovation, and being a clinician during the COVID-19 pandemic. 
    “Healthcare is delivered in three classical settings – an outpatient clinic, the emergency room and the hospital. There are huge gaps between those encounters….a lot of information from patients (data, feedback) is lost because they only meet us in these classic encounters. In the future…we will be going to (the patient)…they will participate more in their healthcare experience. Which will be part of the driver of digital health and will produce the data that artificial intelligence needs to shine.” – Daniel Baumgart
    Dr. Daniel Baumgart is the Director of the Division of Gastroenterology in the Department of Medicine, at the University of Alberta. Dr. Baumgart holds an MD, PhD and an MBA, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He is a founding member of the University of Alberta Precision Health signature area and leads research with the Alberta Precision Health Innovation, Research and Technology Ecosystem. His list of accolades, funding and partnerships are numerous. He has been the principal investigator on over 200 multinational clinical trials. Recent research areas include projects on AI-enabled decision support systems, digital health and virtual care.

    • 49 min
    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E5 - Advances in computer vision supporting diabetes research

    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E5 - Advances in computer vision supporting diabetes research

    Computer Vision is a field within artificial intelligence that is having significant impacts in medicine. Automated analysis of medical scan images can provide rich sources of insight and machine learning techniques to process this data open up a realm of possibilities for both researchers and clinicians. Dr. Nilanjan Ray is a leading researcher in computer vision, image analysis and visual recognition with deep learning. His current focus includes the application of cutting edge computer vision techniques to advance research in diabetes treatment. We talk about how he “accidentally” landed in this field, how computer vision works, the challenges of executing decision making using AI, how he is using generative adversarial networks to advance medical research (not for deep fakes!) and the role of technology in democratizing healthcare.
    “In order to make that kind of (diabetes) treatment available…there is almost no choice but to use AI to bring the costs down to scale up (delivery)” – Nilanjan Ray
    Dr. Nilanjan Ray is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta. His research is in computer vision, image analysis and visual recognition with deep learning. His work includes medical imaging and general computer vision applications including classification, recognition, semantic segmentation, object tracking, image registration and motion detection. Dr. Ray has served as General Co-chair for AI/GI/CRV conference in 2017, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2013-2017) and IET Image Processing (2016-), reviewer for NSERC DG and CRD grants.

    • 42 min
    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E10 - Knowing our virtual selves

    AI4Society Dialogues, S2E10 - Knowing our virtual selves

    Some artists work with clay, or paint, but Dr. Marilène Oliver works with a digitized version of the human body. Her work explores the zeros and ones that we become when WE are rendered into data. Dr. Marilène Oliver is Assistant Professor of Visual Art at the University of Alberta. Her work is at the crossroads of new digital technologies, traditional print, and sculpture – producing objects that bridge the virtual and the real worlds. We talk about her inspiration for using medical scan data as raw material for artistic creation, the personal connections in her work through use of her own data and that of family members, biometric data and the role of our bodies in fuelling AI, her latest project that aims to bring “life” to a body of data to train and AI system, creating an ethics guidance for artistic creators and the tension she feels in seeing the harms of our current AI reality while hoping for a better future. 
    Find out more about Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality.
    “I’ve just witnessed a really positive way that AI is changing a society (in the Faroe Islands) making it much more affluent…I see the evidence of how AI can be really positive. But in my work, I tend to be very cautious and anxious about AI. I worry that it’s a lot of control and focuses on things that mean we lose our humanity.”  – Marilène Oliver
    Dr. Marilène Oliver is an assistant professor of printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada. Dr. Oliver studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, London, UK where she obtained an MPhil with research project ‘Flesh to Pixel, Flesh to Voxel, Flesh to XYZ’. She has exhibited internationally in both private and public galleries including MassMoCA, Knoxville Museum of Art (USA) Frissarias Museum (Greece), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Fundació Sorigué (Spain) and The Glenbow Museum (Canada). Her work is held in a number of private collections around the world as well as a number of public collections such as The Wellcome Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum and Knoxville Museum of Art. In 2019 Dr. Oliver led and curated the exhibition Dyscorpia: Future Intersections of the Body and Technology and in 2020, the online exhibition Dyscorpia 2.1. She is also the host of LASERAlberta, a public series of art and science events and currently leads the research project ‘Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality’.

    • 38 min

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