Professor Regina Barzilay (Image: MIT)The world’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) society is giving a million-dollar award this year to a researcher who identified a new antibiotic and developed an approach to detect and diagnose breast cancer earlier than ever.
The researcher is Professor Regina Barzilay of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will officially give Barzilay the award in February, along with an associated prize of 1 million dollars provided by the online education company Squirrel AI.
“Through my own life experience, I came to realize that we can create technology that can alleviate human suffering and change our understanding of diseases,“ said Barzilay.
“I feel lucky to have found collaborators who share my passion and who have helped me realize this vision.”
Barzilay survived breast cancer in 2014, after which she focused her research on healthcare.
Using AI, she created earlier methods for breast cancer detection and risk assessment that underwent testing at hospitals around the world: in Sweden, Taiwan, and Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
Had doctors used her machine learning model for her own diagnosis, her breast cancer could’ve been detected up to three years earlier, she says.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are also a worldwide concern.
Last year, Barzilay discovered a new antibiotic called Halicin that can kill many strains of disease-causing, antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
“Regina has made truly-changing breakthroughs in imaging breast cancer and predicting the medicinal activity of novel chemicals,” said MIT biology professor Phillip Sharp, a Nobel laureate who has served as director of both the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and what’s now the Koch Institute.
“I am honored to have as a colleague someone who is such a pioneer in using deeply creative machine learning methods to transform the fields of healthcare and biological science.”
Professor Regina Barzilay (Image: MIT)The world’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) society is giving a million-dollar award this year to a researcher who identified a new antibiotic and developed an approach to detect and diagnose breast cancer earlier than ever.
The researcher is Professor Regina Barzilay of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) will officially give Barzilay the award in February, along with an associated prize of 1 million dollars provided by the online education company Squirrel AI.
“Through my own life experience, I came to realize that we can create technology that can alleviate human suffering and change our understanding of diseases,“ said Barzilay.
“I feel lucky to have found collaborators who share my passion and who have helped me realize this vision.”
Barzilay survived breast cancer in 2014, after which she focused her research on healthcare.
Using AI, she created earlier methods for breast cancer detection and risk assessment that underwent testing at hospitals around the world: in Sweden, Taiwan, and Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
Had doctors used her machine learning model for her own diagnosis, her breast cancer could’ve been detected up to three years earlier, she says.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are also a worldwide concern.
Last year, Barzilay discovered a new antibiotic called Halicin that can kill many strains of disease-causing, antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
“Regina has made truly-changing breakthroughs in imaging breast cancer and predicting the medicinal activity of novel chemicals,” said MIT biology professor Phillip Sharp, a Nobel laureate who has served as director of both the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and what’s now the Koch Institute.
“I am honored to have as a colleague someone who is such a pioneer in using deeply creative machine learning methods to transform the fields of healthcare and biological science.”
