What is a Director of Artificial Intelligence? And what does a Director of Artificial Intelligence do?
In our ongoing series on evolving roles in cybersecurity, privacy, and artificial intelligence, we've typically interviewed leaders at SecureWorld cybersecurity conferences.
Stories in the series so far include the Business Information Security Officer (BISO) role at U.S. Bank, the VP of Information Security role at Netflix, and the Chief Security Officer (CSO) role at Southern Methodist University.
This time, however, we're looking at a new and emerging role: the Director of Artificial Intelligence.
For answers about what this role can look like and why it's increasingly needed, we turned to an announcement by the U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs.
The agency just made a big announcement: Dr. Gil Alterovitz will become the agency's first-ever Director of Artificial Intelligence.
Alterovitz has some human intelligence, apparently: degrees from MIT and Carnegie Mellon in electrical, biomedical, and computer engineering. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Thankfully, he's made some easy to understand statements about how he views his new role, why it's needed, and what he'll do as Director of AI:
1. He will help the Department of Veterans Affairs to get the most out of big data. This includes the Million Veteran Program (MVP), which is one of the largest genomic databases in the world. It is loaded with health information waiting to be mined.
"That is what you need to do optimal AI—a lot of deep knowledge," says Alterovitz. "AI is key to really taking advantage of that data to help Vets and potentially others, as well."
2. He will look for ways to improve patient care and treatment efficiency by using AI to spot trends. Says a blog post announcing Dr. Alterovitz's new position:
"Let's say researchers want to identify all VA patients with a certain health condition, for purposes of studying it. But the condition isn't always notated consistently in electronic health records. Doctors might describe it in their free-text notes using any number of different words and phrases. Using AI—researchers could write a program, an algorithm, that teaches the computer to catch all the various ways the condition is notated. That way, the researchers can quickly identify all the pertinent patients and collect a large dataset for the study."
3. He'll bring more tech that can support AI to the Department of Veterans Affairs:
"There's a lot of exciting work in imaging diagnostics with deep learning, outside the VA, and lots of potential within VA," says Alterovitz. "But there's not a lot of activity right now within VA. It's perhaps a little under-represented. Sometimes images are stored locally, and they're not accessible [to experts at other locations with AI expertise.] These technologies are new, and we need to bring them into VA."
4. He'll attempt to find the holy grail of healthcare: better care, at a lower cost point:
"Given how health care is evolving, AI is really the only way to move forward in terms of reducing costs and providing better care," says Alterovitz.
So, what if you had to sum up the Director of AI role in a single sentence? Try this:
"It's about establishing a human-AI collaborative environment."
One that can benefit humans, not replace them.
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