IEEE Conferences

Plenary Keynote
Friday July 7
9:25 - 10:35
Location: Regency Ballroom A/B
AI for Healthcare and Life Sciences: Accelerated Discovery

Recent advances in foundation models and generative technologies have brought us to a pivotal moment in AI. In addition to enhanced productivity, these breakthroughs have the potential to significantly accelerate scientific discovery. At IBM Research we have been developing AI and data science methodologies tailored to healthcare and life sciences for over a decade. I will outline our approach and shed light on our recent focus on utilizing AI for accelerated discovery, substantiated by concrete examples. Furthermore, I will explore the implications of the rapidly advancing frontier of foundation models and generative AI technologies for healthcare and life sciences research, and share insights into what it takes to go beyond large language models to create specialized foundation models to drive breakthroughs in health science discovery.

Brief Biography

Dr. Jianying Hu is IBM Fellow and Global Science Leader, AI for Healthcare and Director of HCLS Research at IBM. She is also an Adjuct Professor at Ichon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She has conducted and led extensive research in machine learning, data mining, statistical pattern recognition, and signal processing, with applications to healthcare analytics and medical informatics, business analytics, and multimedia content analysis, with recent efforts focusing on developing AI technologies for accelerated discovery of therabeutics and biomarkers.

Dr. Hu has published over 150 peer reviewed scientific papers and holds 50 patents. She served as Chair of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDDM) Working Group of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) from 2014 to 2016, and on the Computational Science Advisory Board of Michael J. Fox Foundation from 2017 to 2018. She has served as Associate Editor for many journals including IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TIP, and Pattern Recognition, and currently serves on the Journals and Publications Committee of AMIA, Editorial Board of JAMIA Open, the Advisory Board of JHIR, and the External Advisory Board of Vanderbilt University Department of Biomedical Informatics, the External Advisory Board of the NIH AIM-AHEAD Program, and the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on Establishing a Framework for Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation in Health and Medicine.

Dr. Hu is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), IEEE, and the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). She received the Asian American Engineer of the Year Award in 2013.