Abstract: Medicine stands apart from other areas where machine learning can be applied. While we have seen advances in other fields with lots of data, it is not the volume of data that makes medicine so hard, it is the challenges arising from extracting actionable information from the complexity of the data. It is these challenges that make medicine the most exciting area for anyone who is really interested in the frontiers of machine learning – giving us real-world problems where the solutions are ones that are societally important and which potentially impact on us all. Think Covid 19! In this talk I will show how machine learning is transforming medicine and how medicine is driving new advances in machine learning, including new methodologies in automated machine learning, interpretable and explainable machine learning, dynamic forecasting, and causal inference.

Bio: Professor van der Schaar is John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a Turing Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London, where she leads the effort on data science and machine learning for personalized medicine. She is also a Chancellor's Professor at UCLA. She was elected IEEE Fellow in 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Oon Prize on Preventative Medicine from the University of Cambridge (2018), an NSF Career Award (2004), 3 IBM Faculty Awards, the IBM Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award, the Philips Make a Difference Award and several best paper awards, including the IEEE Darlington Award. She holds 35 granted USA patents. In 2019, she was identified by National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts as the female researcher based in the UK with the most publications in the field of AI. She was also elected as a 2019 'Star in Computer Networking and Communications'. Her research expertise spans signal and image processing, communication networks, network science, multimedia, game theory, distributed systems and machine learning. Her current research focus is on machine learning, AI and operations research for healthcare and medicine. For more details, see her website: http://www.vanderschaar-lab.com