My experience at the Ai4 Healthcare Conference

What happens when you bring physicians, surgeons, CEOs, CTOs, COOs, strategic directors, product managers, software engineers, data analysts, professors and researchers together to discuss the current state of artificial intelligence in healthcare? Well, that’s the idea behind Ai4 Healthcare.

Ai4 Healthcare is a two day conference in NYC that focuses on bringing data practitioners, medical clinicians, and business leaders together to facilitate the discussion around the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare. The event featured over 85 speakers, plenty of networking opportunities and technical/non-technical “track” guidance on which talks to attend. …

This August, I heard the words that no one wants to hear from their doctor: “You have cancer.” I was diagnosed with a rare non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After a tumultuous couple of weeks of testing and second opinions it was clear that my prognosis was good. The months of treatment had me thinking about my luck; even though I had to live with cancer, I was fortunate to have a good prognosis. I found myself pondering the age-old question, “is there some reason for this?”

During this time, I was really starting to dive into data science. I began thinking about the impact of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) on cancer treatment and its effect on prognosis. Given my situation, I wondered if I should begin to focus studying this area of data science. …

Here’s a great question:

How do you get students who ‘hate’ math and aren’t interested in learning programming to learn the skills that will drive careers for the rest of the century?

Sometimes I think the answer is to trick them into it! Is there a puzzled look on your face wondering what I could possibly mean or maybe how it could even be ethical? Let me explain: we need to let the kids choose projects on topics that they’re passionate about. …

Since I was in high school, I would hear my friends in Model UN or those that were really interested in politics talking about how “The Republicans did this” or “The Democrats did that”. With what seems to be one of the most politicized elections in history about a year behind us, I wanted to answer the question “Is Congress more politically polarized than ever before?”

I set out to do that by some simple visualizations of data that is freely available from the Senate and House websites (both of whom have party division pages). …

The Wall Street Journal published an article on May 31, 2017 with the title Though Outnumbered, Female CEOs Earn More Than Male Chiefs. The analysis done by the Wall Street Journal showed that female CEOs repeatedly outearn their male counterparts. Last year, 21 female CEOs received a median compensation package of $13.8 million, compared with the $11.6 million median for 382 male CEOs.

I was intrigued and a bit skeptical. When I looked closer, I noticed they reported the median earnings. Median is more robust than mean, but I was curious about where in the distribution of compensation the female CEOs were and wanted to know if that made a difference. …

On The Importance of Good Information

Every person on Earth is born willing to absorb everything they experience. From the gentle blowing of the wind across their face, to the sensations they experience as they eat, each child absorbs that information and stores it.

This happens throughout our whole lives. Each experience expands the library in our heads. We continue gathering information and testing our hypotheses about how the world works until we can come up with heuristics — mental shortcuts that don’t burden our brains but don’t guarantee an optimal or perfect solution. …