There is mounting public concern over the influence that AI based systems has in our society. Coalitions in all sectors are acting worldwide to resist hamful applications of AI. From indigenous people addressing the lack of reliable data, to smart city stakeholders, to students protesting the academic relationships with sex trafficker and MIT donor Jeffery Epstein, the questionable ethics and values of those heavily investing in and profiting from AI are under global scrutiny. There are biased, wrongful, and disturbing assumptions embedded in AI algorithms that could get locked in without intervention. Our best human judgment is needed to contain AI's harmful impact. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of AI will be to make us ultimately understand how important human wisdom truly is in life on earth.

The study of adverse childhood experiences and their consequences has emerged over the past 20 years. In this study, we aimed to leverage explainable artificial intelligence, and propose a proof-of-concept prototype for a knowledge-driven evidence-based recommendation system to improve surveillance of adverse childhood experiences. We used concepts from an ontology that we have developed to build and train a question-answering agent using the Google DialogFlow engine. In addition to the question-answering agent, the initial prototype includes knowledge graph generation and recommendation components that leverage third-party graph technology. To showcase the framework functionalities, we here present a prototype design and demonstrate the main features through four use case scenarios motivated by an initiative currently implemented at a children hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Ongoing development of the prototype requires implementing an optimization algorithm of the recommendations, incorporating a privacy layer through a personal health library, and conducting a clinical trial to assess both usability and usefulness of the implementation. This semantic-driven explainable artificial intelligence prototype can enhance health care practitioners ability to provide explanations for the decisions they make.

The use of machine learning (ML) in health care raises numerous ethical concerns, especially as models can amplify existing health inequities. Here, we outline ethical considerations for equitable ML in the advancement of health care. Specifically, we frame ethics of ML in health care through the lens of social justice. We describe ongoing efforts and outline challenges in a proposed pipeline of ethical ML in health, ranging from problem selection to post-deployment considerations. We close by summarizing recommendations to address these challenges.

Its impact is drastic and real: Youtube's AIdriven recommendation system would present sports videos for days if one happens to watch a live baseball game on the platform [1]; email writing becomes much faster with machine learning (ML) based auto-completion [2]; many businesses have adopted natural language processing based chatbots as part of their customer services [3]. AI has also greatly advanced human capabilities in complex decision-making processes ranging from determining how to allocate security resources to protect airports [4] to games such as poker [5] and Go [6]. All such tangible and stunning progress suggests that an "AI summer" is happening. As some put it, "AI is the new electricity" [7]. Meanwhile, in the past decade, an emerging theme in the AI research community is the so-called "AI for social good" (AI4SG): researchers aim at developing AI methods and tools to address problems at the societal level and improve the wellbeing of the society.

Technology is changing how we practice medicine. Sensors and wearables are getting smaller and cheaper, and algorithms are becoming powerful enough to predict medical outcomes. Yet despite rapid advances, healthcare lags behind other industries in truly putting these technologies to use. A major barrier to entry is the cross-disciplinary approach required to create such tools, requiring knowledge from many people across many fields. We aim to drive the field forward by unpacking that barrier, providing a brief introduction to core concepts and terms that define digital medicine. Specifically, we contrast "clinical research" versus routine "clinical care," outlining the security, ethical, regulatory, and legal issues developers must consider as digital medicine products go to market. We classify types of digital measurements and how to use and validate these measures in different settings. To make this resource engaging and accessible, we have included illustrations and figures ...

AI will change radiology, but it won't replace radiologists.

A variety of methods existing for generating synthetic electronic health records (EHRs), but they are not capable of generating unstructured text, like emergency department (ED) chief complaints, history of present illness or progress notes. Here, we use the encoder-decoder model, a deep learning algorithm that features in many contemporary machine translation systems, to generate synthetic chief complaints from discrete variables in EHRs, like age group, gender, and discharge diagnosis. After being trained end-to-end on authentic records, the model can generate realistic chief complaint text that preserves much of the epidemiological information in the original data. As a side effect of the model's optimization goal, these synthetic chief complaints are also free of relatively uncommon abbreviation and misspellings, and they include none of the personally-identifiable information (PII) that was in the training data, suggesting it may be used to support the de-identification of text in EHRs. When combined with algorithms like generative adversarial networks (GANs), our model could be used to generate fully-synthetic EHRs, facilitating data sharing between healthcare providers and researchers and improving our ability to develop machine learning methods tailored to the information in healthcare data.

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 104, 19-35.

From a public-health perspective, the occurrence of drug-drug-interactions (DDI) from multiple drug prescriptions is a serious problem, especially in the elderly population. This is true both for individuals and the system itself since patients with complications due to DDI will likely re-enter the system at a costlier level. We conducted an 18-month study of DDI occurrence in Blumenau (Brazil; pop. 340,000) using city-wide drug dispensing data from both primary and secondary-care level. Our goal is also to identify possible risk factors in a large population, ultimately characterizing the burden of DDI for patients, doctors and the public system itself. We found 181 distinct DDI being prescribed concomitantly to almost 5% of the city population. We also discovered that women are at a 60% risk increase of DDI when compared to men, while only having a 6% co-administration risk increase. Analysis of the DDI co-occurrence network reveals which DDI pairs are most associated with the observed greater DDI risk for females, demonstrating that contraception and hormone therapy are not the main culprits of the gender disparity, which is maximized after the reproductive years. Furthermore, DDI risk increases dramatically with age, with patients age 70-79 having a 50-fold risk increase in comparison to patients aged 0-19. Interestingly, several null models demonstrate that this risk increase is not due to increased polypharmacy with age. Finally, we demonstrate that while the number of drugs and co-administrations help predict a patient's number of DDI ($R^2=.413$), they are not sufficient to flag these patients accurately, which we achieve by training classifiers with additional data (MCC=.83,F1=.72). These results demonstrate that accurate warning systems for known DDI can be devised for public and private systems alike, resulting in substantial prevention of DDI-related ADR and savings.

Scientists, researchers, and innovators come up with amazing breakthroughs every year, and that was no different in 2017 either. No matter whether we look at physics (proving the existence of gravitational waves), astronomy (discovering new planets) or biology (detecting a fluorescent frog in Brazil), we come across mind-blowing scientific findings everywhere. Healthcare was no exception, moreover, some say the field of medicine is one of the most innovative fields today.