AI Seminar – Russ Greiner
Online
Online
Presenters: Russ Greiner, University of Alberta
Title: Learning Models that Predict Objective, Actionable Labels
Abstract: Many medical researchers want a tool that “does what a top medical clinician does, but does it better”. This presentation explores this goal. This requires first defining what “better” means, leading to the idea of outcomes that are “objective” and then to ones that are actionable, with a meaningful evaluation measure. We will discuss some of the subtle issues in this exploration – what does “objective” mean, the role of the (perhaps personalized) evaluation function, multi-step actions, counterfactual issues, distributional evaluations, etc. Collectively, this analysis argues we should learn models whose outcome labels are objective and actionable, as that will lead to tools that are useful and cost-effective.
Bio: Russ Greiner worked in both academic and industrial research before settling at the University of Alberta, where he is now a Professor in Computing Science and the founding Scientific Director of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. He has been Program/Conference Chair for various major conferences, and has served on the editorial boards of a number of other journals. He was elected a Fellow of the AAAI, has been awarded a McCalla Professorship and a Killam Annual Professorship; and in 2021, received the CAIAC Lifetime Achievement Award and became a CIFAR AI Chair. In 2022, the Telus World of Science museum honored him with a panel, and he received the (UofA) Precision Health Innovator Award. For his mentoring, he received a 2020 FGSR Great Supervisor Award. He has published over 300 refereed papers, most in the areas of machine learning and recently medical informatics, including 5 that have been awarded Best Paper prizes. The main foci of his current work are (1) bio- and medical- informatics; (2) learning and using effective probabilistic models and (3) formal foundations of learnability.
The University of Alberta Artificial Intelligence (AI) Seminar is a weekly meeting where researchers (including students, developers, and professors) interested in AI can share their current research. Presenters include local speakers from the University of Alberta and industry as well as other institutions. The seminars discuss a wide range of topics related in any way to Artificial Intelligence, from foundational theoretical work to innovative applications of AI techniques to new fields and problems are of interest. Learn more at the AI Seminar website and by subscribing to the mailing list!
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