Artificial Intelligence: New Horizons in Medicine

Gil Alterovitz is the director of the National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). NAII seeks to develop AI research and development capabilities at the VA as a means to support veterans, their families, survivors, and caregivers. The Institute also designs and collaborates on large-scale AI research and development initiatives, national AI policy, and partnerships across agencies, industries, and academia. Dr. Alterovitz has led national and international collaborative initiatives for developing novel informatics methods and approaches for integrating clinical, pharmaceutical, and genomic information, from research to point-of-care. He is a member of the Precision Medicine Task Force under the White House’s Office of the National Coordinator. He is also one of the core writers of the White House Office of Science Technology and Policy’s National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan, which was recently updated. The policy supports a national AI initiative and includes an additional strategic priority for public-private partnerships. He has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon in electrical, biomedical and computer engineering (including a doctorate). He’s a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. His work on integrative methods for “big data” in the biomedical informatics space has been published or presented in more than 50 peer-reviewed publications ranging from academic journals and international conferences to three books (including “Systems Bioinformatics: An Engineering Case-based Approach,” ranked #1 in new Amazon bioinformatics category).

As the first Chief Data Officer for the Office of Inspector General (OIG) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Caryl is establishing an office focused on providing more and better access to data and analytics to support OIG’s mission. Her team seeks to improve access to internal and external data; accelerate analytics for use in audits, investigations, evaluations, and compliance oversight; and enhance OIG’s use of data to make more informed decisions.

Prior to joining the HHS OIG, Caryl was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Risk and Decision Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). She also previously served as the Operations Research Division Chief at the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, and led a team of analysts at the Center for Naval Analyses.

She has a B.E. in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University.

Dr. Caban is the Chief of Clinical and Research Informatics at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC). He manages a team of scientists, engineers, researchers, and developers that provide enterprise applications, business intelligence, machine learning, metrics, data, and analytical support to the NICoE Intrepid Spirit Network across 10+ military treatment facilities (MTFs).

Trained as a computer scientist and with over thirteen years of experience in inter-disciplinary clinical and informatics research, he has authored over 50 scientific papers related to clinical informatics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, visualization, and predictive models.

During the last few years he has served in different roles including the Chair of the DHA Enterprise Intelligence and Analytics IPT, the Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Visual Analytics working group, and the Vice Chair of the 2016 IEEE Visualization conference.

In 2018, he received the Defense Health Agency (DHA) Innovation Award and the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States (AMSUS) HealthIT award for his contribution to the Military Health System (MHS). In 2019, the TBI Portal – one of the enterprise applications that he has managed since its inception — received the Federal HealthIT Innovation award.

He’s committed to educating and training our next generation in informatics, ML/AI, and data science. He’s an adjunct faculty at the Uniform Services University (USUHS) where he mentors PhD students interested in clinical informatics and he’s also an adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University – Applied Physics Lab where he teaches two of the core classes of the Data Science graduate program.

Anil Chaudhry has over 20 years of progressive leadership experience in technology delivery, operations, and program management in the defense, intelligence, and national security sectors. At the Artificial Intelligence CoE, Chaudhry advises federal agencies on establishing mature data governance and management practices, developing innovative approaches for leveraging data as a strategic asset, and laying the foundation for advancing data discovery, access, and use through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Prior to joining the CoE, Chaudhry served in critical leadership positions within US Customs and Border Protection and as a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF) at the Defense Business Transformation Agency. Chaudhry served as an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps. Chaudhry was one of three DHS employees selected to attend the National War College in 2016 as part of the DHS Senior Succession Management Program.

For two decades, Ben Cushing has been a leader in emerging technology solutions across multiple industries and is committed to radical innovation in healthcare. Before joining Red Hat, he served as the Chief Technology Officer for MDLogix, a behavioral health IT firm supporting Johns Hopkins Medicine. There he architected and brought to market a behavioural health cloud platform for use with employer, healthcare, and education markets.

In addition to supporting analytics and operations at the National Institutes of Health for 6 years, Cushing had the opportunity to practice a scaled agile framework with Accenture where he led the technical architecture and design for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Electronic Health Management Platform, an industry leading Health Management and Care Coordination platform serving 9 million patients.

His tenure at Accenture began with the acquisition of Agilex, where he designed LSI solutions, developed systems to automate the Post-9/11 GI bill, and supported in-theater data collection and analytics tools. While at Agilex, Ben architected and led the development of a mobile Software Development Kit, still in use today by the VA to produce more than 60 applications.

Mona G. Flores, MD, is the global head of Medical AI at NVIDIA. She brings a unique perspective with her varied experience in clinical medicine, medical applications and business. She’s a board certified cardiac surgeon and the previous chief medical officer of a digital health company. She holds an MBA in management information systems and has worked on Wall Street. Her ultimate goal is the betterment of medicine through AI.

Mr. Thomson serves as the Chief Information Officer of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He works to provide the information technology support needed by researchers on the NIH campus as well as NHLBI funded researchers around the world. He also serves as the co-lead of the NHLBI DataSTAGE program – a cloud based data commons that provides storage and computational resources to the heart, lung, blood and sleep research community. DataSTAGE currently stores 3.2PB of genomic and clinical data for the TOPMed program along with millions of imaging. Prior to this role he serves as the NHLBI’s Chief Information Security Officer and spent most of his career in the commercial world consulting to pharma, insurance, finance and logistics. He has also spent time working in broadcast television, computer animation and has directed an Applied Research Center at a university. He trained at the University of Otago in Dunedin New Zealand and holds a BSc(Hons) in Psychology and a DipGrad in Computer Science.

Craig’s latest area of focus is supporting the build of Acxiom’s COVID-19 repository, developing a geo-temporal structure to frame key COVID-19 dimensions for subsequent integration with brands’ behavioral data, attitudinal data, demographic, lifestage and interests data, and marketing treatments. The primary objective for the repository is assessing and isolating COVID-19 impacts for a variety of use cases.

He has been developing offline and online marketing solutions for more than 20 years, utilizing a variety of statistical and machine learning techniques across multiple industries including healthcare, financial services, travel and entertainment, retail, and consumer packaged goods, all with a very strong focus on maintaining privacy constraints.

Before joining Acxiom, Craig was an adjunct professor in statistics at St John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, for eight years and was co-founder of Quinetix, LLC, which was acquired by Acxiom in November 2008. He has a bachelor’s of science degree in finance and master’s degree in statistics, both from the Rochester Institute of Technology.