Should synthetic intelligence be allowed to make care choices for sufferers? Though the way forward for AI might conjure up doomsday visions of robots and computer systems intent on rendering human existence superfluous, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) addressed questions surrounding the usage of AI in well being by their inaugural summer season program targeted on educating highschool college students.
The Jameel Clinic Summer Program, which befell July 10-21, accepted a complete of 51 college students from primarily Boston-area colleges, with a dedication to reaching college students from various backgrounds.
The program, which break up college students up into two cohorts of 25 college students for every week, had core choices together with programs like “Intro to Python,” “Intro to Clinical AI,” and “Intro to Drug Discovery” whereas additionally facilitating journeys to numerous native establishments such because the Museum of Science Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Amgen.
“Organizing this boot camp had a personal significance to me. When my family immigrated to Israel, it was tough — my parents and I worked minimum wage jobs to survive,” School of Engineering Distinguished Professor and Jameel Clinic AI school lead Regina Barzilay remembers. “Going to university transformed my life. Many of the students in the program have similar backgrounds. I hope that exposing them to exciting science at MIT will open new opportunities for them.”
“I’m not supposed to be here today,” said Collin Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor at MIT and Jameel Clinic principal investigator, on changing into each a pc scientist and heart specialist. In his lecture, Stultz spoke of the hardships his dad and mom endured after immigrating to New York from Jamaica. He emphasised that he and his members of the family had by no means thought to use to colleges like Harvard University, considering of it as a faculty for “people like the Kennedys” till Stultz obtained the concept to use from a classmate who was planning to use.
“It is my hope that the interactions between students in the Jameel Clinic Summer Program and MIT faculty will highlight the wealth of opportunities available at the intersection of computer science and medicine,” Stultz says.
As a results of a beneficiant reward from Joseph Bates and Kristin Loeffler by their AI for Humanity Foundation, the Jameel Clinic was in a position to supply the summer season program for free of charge and cut back the monetary obstacles for college kids from under-resourced backgrounds. Bates shared that on the age of 13 he was found by a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University and have become the primary teenager to enter the college. “I had been doing an adequate, but not good, job in a dangerous Baltimore City public junior high school,” Bates says. “Being at Hopkins was wonderful, socially and intellectually, and it led me to a computer science PhD at Cornell University, then CS professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Someone taking an interest really mattered, and it changed my life.”
According to the National Science Foundation, the U.S. STEM workforce step by step diversified between 2011 and 2021, with elevated illustration of ladies and underrepresented college students of shade. But within the college-educated workforce, a 2021 report confirmed that simply 16 p.c of engineers had been ladies and 16 p.c of underrepresented college students of shade — Hispanic, Black, and American Indian or Indigenous Alaskan people — had been employed in science and engineering occupations with at the least a bachelor’s diploma.
Angely Mejia Martinez, a rising junior at Chelsea High School and aspiring physician, highlighted Jameel Clinic chair and MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp’s discuss as one among her favorites. Sharp spoke about rising up on a small farm in rural Kentucky earlier than setting off on his profession in science, which ultimately led to his 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. “I really got inspired by that because when I was little, many people would say ‘I don’t think you can do this,’ and I was always like ‘I can do this,’” Martinez says. “I think I can achieve anything I set my mind into.”
“It was very surreal because I didn’t think I’d be here,” Priyani Rawal, a rising junior learning data expertise at Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School, says. Rawal’s favourite class was Barzilay’s Intro to AI/ML lecture. “I was so amazed by what we were learning … it made me inspired to go into [the machine learning] field.”
Adam Nouri, a rising senior at Pioneer Charter School II, signed up for this system after receiving an electronic mail from his pc science instructor. Before making use of, Nouri had thought of enrolling in a summer season course for programming at Bunker Hill Community College, an possibility sometimes supplied for free of charge to Pioneer college students. However, Nouri rapidly realized that free enrollment was solely obtainable in the course of the faculty 12 months and says it could have value round $800 for him to enroll in the summertime. If he hadn’t gotten into the Jameel Clinic Summer Program, Nouri believes he would have continued working at his part-time service job for the remainder of the summer season whereas attempting to code a recreation or construct a pc together with his associates in his free time. “When I got into the [Jameel Clinic Summer Program], I was actually really excited,” Nouri remembers. “Now I feel like I have a clearer path I want to pursue.”
As a part of their last group challenge shows given on the final day of this system, college students had been assigned AI instruments utilized in medical settings or drug discovery, like PathAI or AlphaFold2, and requested to clarify their assigned software together with its potential advantages and dangers to a target market of their selection.
“There is a heavy emphasis placed not only on innovation in science, health care and technology, but also on collaboration across disciplines,” Jay Ananth, a rising junior at Troy High School, says. “During the summer program, I was taught AI and health care not as a high school student, but as a peer — a fellow researcher — who has the ability to innovate and make a change.”
Serena Hu, a rising junior at Lincoln Sudbury High School, felt much less uncertainty about her future after attending this system. “I always wanted to try new things so that I could find something that I love to do, but I can pretty confidently say that I found it here,” Hu says. “They’re not just teaching you the material — they’re also inspiring you.”
The Jameel Clinic Summer Program was organized by Ignacio Fuentes, Alex Ouyang, and Marinalva Smith. Maggie Wang, Antonella Catanzaro, Ciarra Brodie, Rohan Kundargi, and Christina Moscat helped to supervise and contribute to the success of this system. Instructors included Pulkit Agrawal, Sharifa Alghowinem, Shrooq Alsenan, Manisha Bahl, Regina Barzilay, Rebecca Boiarsky, Felix Faltings, Florian Fintelmann, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Susan Hockfield, Insoo Hyun, Noah Jones, Ila Kumar, Peter Mikhael, Carles Monterrubio, Tiffany Pereira Portela, Phillip Sharp, Hannes Stärk, Vinith Suriyakumar, Oliver Thiel, Randi Williams, Jeremy Wohlwend, and Rachel Wu.