Aifred in Review: A Start-Up’s First Year
This year has been nothing short of incredible here at Aifred Health. We kicked off 2017 with an application to the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition, and are finishing the year in high spirits with our Milestone Award as one of the Top 2 teams moving forward in the competition, a myriad of accomplishments from the past year, and many exciting plans for 2018. Before diving into the new year, we want to take a moment to reflect on the events of our first year as a start-up. These past 12 months have included many landmark events which have contributed to a sense of acceleration for the company — and while it’s exciting to have momentum, now is also a great time to look back and appreciate the strides we’ve taken as a company.
An important note to begin on: as a start up, we have a lot of thanks to give to those who have supported us, particularly in the beginning of our journey. Of course, we are grateful to XPRIZE for providing opportunities for us to connect with the AI community and acting as the driving motivation for bringing the Aifred team together. In addition, we have to thank the District 3 Innovation Center at Concordia (D3) for their support and donation of space for our team. We are also thankful for the McGill Office of Student Life and Learning as well as Building 21, who have sponsored us and invited us to be part of a community devoted to innovation and creativity.
In the early months of 2017, we took our first steps. We applied to the XPRIZE competition, joined D3, and submitted our XPRIZE proposal. In April 2017, we were accepted into the XPRIZE competition, and our journey as a start-up really began to gather speed.
In the following months, we had opportunities to attend several conferences where we could both contribute our ideas to the AI community as well absorb the wisdom of experienced individuals in the field. At C2 Montreal, there were several recurring themes throughout the event such as the importance of creativity in AI, the advantage of start-up agility in competitive environments, and the need for policies to guide AI development. We met world leaders in the development of socially responsible AI at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, and were part of discussions regarding the role of AI at a global level. Back in Montreal, we had the chance to demo at Startupfest and hear from experts in another domain: start-ups. Several speakers gave powerful presentations, communicating their views on what made their endeavours successful. The importance of design, company environment, and Canada’s multi-cultural population for start-ups were all topics of discussion, and the overall event fostered a feeling of community and support between young businesses. It gave us a taste of how advice from entrepreneurs outside of the field of health tech can bring significant insight and spark powerful ideas.
Later on in the year, we received a D3 Centre Grant to hire our first intern, who has brought valuable knowledge and skills to the table at Aifred Health and allowed us to expand our efforts. We also joined the McGill Notman House cohort, to whom we would also like to give thanks for their support.
In addition to external partnerships, conferences and speaking opportunities, our Research, Tech, and Product Development teams all achieved milestones of their own. The Research division has spent months extracting data and synthesizing findings for a literature review of biomarkers for treatment response in depression, the first and largest systematic review on this topic completed. This information is also clearly of relevance for our deep learning algorithm. The Technology team has developed Vulcan, a deep learning framework, along with additional model interpretability tools. This framework is the foundation of the technology which will use personalized patient features as inputs and return a list of possible treatments, ranked according to confidence level. The Product Development team has been iteratively refining the design of the user interface and website according to feedback from various audiences, as well as handling data storage and retrieval. The team at Aifred Health has also started getting access to large datasets, which consist of data holding potential predictive value for response to various antidepressants from clinical trials. Throughout the year, our team has also expanded with the assembly of a clinical advisory board, made up of experts in domains such as Machine Learning, Bioethics, Clinical Trials, and various depression treatments.
The Fall of 2017 was a whirlwind of events. Our co-founder and Director of Scientific Partnership, Sonia Israel, spoke at Synergie Émergente Recherche Industrie (SÉRI) Montreal in October, a conference aiming to facilitate co-operation between research and industry. In Amsterdam, our CEO and Chief Medical Officer, David Benrimoh, attended World Summit AI. At this conference, we had the pleasure of demoing at the IBM XPRIZE table, discussing AI start-ups onstage, and conversing about our favourite topics with conference-goers. In particular, we met the co-founders of Researchably, a tailored research platform which helps clients keep up to date with specific information of interest. A note about Researchably: we are extremely impressed with this team’s unbelievable efficiency and thoroughness. We’ve been able to call on them for a variety of research, and each time we are astonished by their effectiveness. They are phenomenal. Thanks, Researchably.
Also in the Autumn, we were recognized as one of the Top 4 teams in the Caravane Régionale de l’Entrepreneuriat (CRE) Provincial Start-Up Cup, where our co-founder and Director of Research, Kelly Perlman, deftly used her charm and intellect to present our company in a literal wrestling ring stage set-up.
We have been ecstatic to stand on stages all over the world in our first year as a start-up: Aifred Health also appeared at the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE European Forum in Paris, spoke about disability AI at AI World Forum in Toronto, and gave the keynote speech on ethical concerns in health care AI at Giant Health Event in London, UK. On a more technical side, our co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Robert Fratila, pitched at DATAtalks, an event organized by the Data Intelligence Society of Concordia University. The audience ranged from Concordia School of Business students to data science managers of various companies, and we had the chance to speak with investors and discuss our company with individuals from diverse backgrounds.
And finally, a year of intense research, work, and development culminated in our success at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS’17), where we were awarded a Milestone Award as one of the Top 2 Teams out of the 59 teams advancing in the XPRIZE Competition.
Here is a photo of our co-founder and CFO Eleonore Fournier-Tombs displaying our Milestone Award on behalf of the company and embodying the elation of the entire team:
It’s hard to describe the feeling of excitement within the team that resulted from the news of our Top 2 ranking — it’s a wonderful thing to be recognized for hard work, and we are honoured to have received the award. Immediately following the XPRIZE news, our CBC Spark interview was released, where Sonia Israel had the chance not only to present Aifred Health, but to discuss the product and the measures we take into consideration for interpretability and ethical concerns we are addressing in its development. We appreciate these types of interviews, which allow us to delve deeper into the nuances of not only our product, but AI development in general. At Aifred Health, we highly value not only public accessibility to information about AI products, but public understanding of what exactly is the intention of these products.
Throughout the year, we have mentioned in presentations and publications our in-house framework for “Meticulous Transparency”, which in its essence is focused on demonstrating intentionality of AI applications. In order to achieve this demonstration of intention, we propose that a thorough description, projected risks and benefits, intended scope of use, and sources of data of AI projects should be presented to civil society and regulatory bodies in advance of developing an application. We are encouraged by the like-minded individuals and organizations we have met throughout the year, and the general atmosphere of the AI community in this regard — it’s an exciting time for AI development, but also a critical window for caution and analysis.
Finally, as we kick off the new year, we are thankful to those who have championed us in the media (shout-out to Massive for this splendid piece of work), and to those who have supported us as a company in the start-up community, as a project in the AI community, and as a psychiatry application in the healthcare community. We’ve got lots planned for 2018: more AI conferences, competitions, discussion panels, talks, and collaborations. Our team at Aifred Health continues to work hard with a drive to improve lives, and with motivation for creation. We’re thrilled with the momentum we’ve achieved, and we have no intention of slowing down in 2018.
