Peter Szolovits Interview - Dialogs Beyond Borders

Peter Szolovits is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (Post-Tenure) at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology. He directs the Clinical Decision Making Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. That group is engaged in a variety of research efforts, including: clinical decision support systems; building predictive models for patient outcomes by extrapolating from large patient cohorts; improving natural language processing methods to extract clinical data from doctors’ and nurses’ notes and de-identifying clinical narratives; combining lab, medication, notes, reports, discharge summary, imaging, and genetic/genomic data to better understand diseases and the state of individual patients; “big data” techniques to allow analysis of vast and growing data sets; modeling temporal evolution of patient states; and technologies to help protect the confidentiality of electronic medical records. The group also focuses on issues of explainability and fairness of machine learning models. Prof. Szolovits has supervised 42 doctoral theses, served on the committees of another 83 doctoral students, and supervised nearly a hundred master’s theses.