#AAAI2021 invited talk – Regina Barzilay on deploying machine learning methods in cancer diagnosis and drug design

In September 2020, Regina Barzilay was announced as the winner of the inaugural AAAI Squirrel AI award. Regina was formally presented with the prize during an award ceremony at the AAAI2021 conference, following which she delivered an invited talk. She spoke about two particular areas of medicine that she has been researching: drug discovery and cancer diagnosis. It is well-known that the development of drugs is slow and expensive. Currently, drug discovery is primarily experimentally driven, with properties of molecules investigated empirically.