The Machine Learning for Health group targets "Healthy ML", focusing on creating applying machine learning to understand and improve health.

We believe that health is important, and improvements in health improve lives. However, we still don't fundamentally understand what it means to be healthy, and the same patient may receive different treatments across different hospitals or clinicians as new evidence is discovered, or individual illness is interpreted. Health is unlike many success stories in machine learning so far - games like Go and self-driving cars - because we do not have well-defined goals that can be used to learn rules. The nuance of health also requires that we keep machine learning models "healthy" - working to ensure that they do not learn biased rules or detrimental recommendations.

Improving health requires targeting and evidence – our group tackles part of this puzzle with machine learning. There are many novel technical opportunities for machine learning in health challenges, and important progress to be made with careful application to domain.

Read more about our Research Directions and Publications.

Upcoming Talks

• Oct 24-27, 2021, Invited Keynote Talk ASTRO Annual Meeting
• May 19, 2021, MIT Systemic Racism Workshop
• Apr 12, 2021, Algorithms and Data for Fair and Equitable AI, MIT Jameel Clinic
• Apr 8-9, 2021, General Chair ACM CHIL 2021
• Mar 26, 2021, MIT Workshop on Data-driven Decision Making in Socio-Technical Systems
• Mar 11, 2021 Machine Learning for Health Care Panel, WiDS Cambridge
• Mar 10, 2021 Keynote Panel - Machine Learning and Health Inequities during COVID, FaccT 2021

Recent Talks

• Invited talk at PSB on January 5, 2021.
• Invited talk at MiCHAMP Seminar Series on November 20, 2020.
• Invited talk at Cornell Machine Learning in Medicine webinar series on November 6, 2020.
• Invited talk at Columbia Data for Good Seminar Series on November 4, 2020.
• Invited Talk at Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Learning Health Systems (SAIL), Bermuda, October 19-21, 2020.
• Invited Talk at Stanford DBDS Biostatistics Workshop, October 15, 2020.
• Invited Talk at Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society Seminar Series, September 23, 2020.
• Panel Discussion at JSM on The Need for Interpretable and Fair Algorithms in Health Care and Policy, Philadelphia, PA, August 5, 2020.
• Invited Talk at Frontiers in Machine Learning on "Expl-AI-n Yourself: The False Hope of Explainable Machine Learning in Healthcare", Microsoft Research, July 22, 2020. [Video]
• Invited Panelist at Algorithm Design, Law, and Policy Virtual Workshop on "Interdisciplinary Research at the Intersection of Machine Learning, Fairness and Health", Simons Institute, Berkeley, CA, July 21, 2020.
• General Chair for the ACM Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL), Toronto, CA, July 22-23, 2020.
• Invited Talk at the Stanford Center for Bioethics Lecture Series, Palo Alto, CA, June 2, 2020.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and  U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) summit on artificial intelligence and health care services in Washington, DC, March 31-April 1, 2020.
• Invited Talk at the Stanford AI for Social Good Lecture Series, Palo Alto, CA, Feb 10, 2020. 

Co-Chair Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) Think Tank on ML and clinical research, January 29-30, 2020, Washington DC.

NeurIPS Workshop Co-Chair at NeurIPS 2019, Dec 9-14, 2019, Vancouver, BC.

Invited Talk at the Global Forum for AI and Humanity at the Global Partnership on AI in Paris, France, October 29, 2019.

Keynote Talk at Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence conference, The Rotman School, October 24, 2019.

Panelist at "Diversity & Inclusion in a Data-Driven World", 11^th annual Connected Health Conference, Boston, MA, Oct. 16-18, 2019.

Fair Health and ML Summit, Data and Society Institute, New York City, Oct 11, 2019.

Toronto Health Data Hackathon Host, Centre for Social Innovation, October 4 - 5, 2019.

Invited Talk at TEDx UofT-Fields Salon, Oct 3, 2019.

Invited Talk at Ethics of AI in Context Series Talk @ University of Toronto Centre for Ethics, Oct 1, 2019.

Invited Talk at "Machine Intelligence in Healthcare: Perspectives on Trustworthiness, Explainability, Usability and Transparency" @ NIH/NCATS Workshop, July 12, 2019.

Keynote at iBest Sympsoium, June 14, 2019.

Invited Talk at "Wrong at the Root: Racial Bias and the Tension Between Numbers and Words in Non-Internet Data" Summer Cluster on Fairness @ Simons Institute, University of Berkeley, June 5, 2019.

Invited talk at Rotman Centre for Health Sector Strategy Conference, May 24, 2019.

Invited talk at Stanford Big Data in Precision Health conference, May 22, 2019.

Prof. Ghassemi hosted the Machine Learning for Health Unconference (http://www.ml4h.org) in Spring 2019.

Participant at CIFAR AI for Health (AI4H) Roundtable, led by Dr. Elissa Strome (CIFAR) and Dr. Tim Evans (World Bank), May 13, 2019.

Panelist on Raw Talk Live Event @ JLabs Toronto, May 7, 2019.

Keynote speaker at MIT Club of Toronto AI/ML Talks @ Vector Institute, April 16, 2019.

Inaugural invited talk at Microsoft Research Montreal AI Distinguished Lecture Series @ MILA, March 25, 2019.

Keynote at Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference @ Stanford, March 4, 2019.