POSTPONED: Second Annual Health Symposium to Focus on Operationalizing Artificial Intelligence

On April 21–22, 2020, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, is hosting its second annual National Health Symposium. Information about registration, the agenda and confirmed speakers is available on the symposium website.

This year’s symposium focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and the continuum between essential research and development and the translation from innovation into operational impact. Ashley Llorens, chief of APL’s Intelligent Systems Center, will lead session one: Unlocking the Power of AI for Health Care. The speakers will explore, among other topics, recognizing potential applications in health care, identifying techniques that hold the most promise and learning from early success and failures.

Dr. Adam Cohen, a program manager in APL’s National Health Mission Area will lead session two: Explaining the Performance of AI in Health Care, which will explore how AI tools can be most impactful, who uses them and how their performance can be studied and measured.

Erin Hahn, a senior national security analyst, will lead the final session, Ensuring Responsible Implementation of AI in Healthcare, which will highlight critical ethical and privacy issues associated with applying AI capabilities to gleaning health and medical insights.

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

• Gil Alterovitz, director, National Artificial Intelligence Institute, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
• Khair ElZarrad, deputy director, Office of Medical Policy, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
• Christine Fox, APL assistant director
• James Weinstein, senior vice president, Microsoft Healthcare
• Peter McCaffrey, chief technology officer and co-founder, VastBiome
• Hassan Tetteh, health mission chief, Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center
• Sabine Wilhelm, chief of Psychology and director of the Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders Program, Massachusetts General Hospital

Last year’s Inaugural Symposium, sponsored by APL and the National Defense Industrial Association, brought together nearly 200 experts from government, academia and industry to discuss ways that advances in research and development can translate into better delivery of health care. The symposium also allowed leaders in research and operations to explore the latest breakthroughs and identify practical approaches to engineering a vision for health care.

Several distinguished speakers were in attendance, including Vice Adm. Raquel Bono, director of the Defense Health Agency; Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health, Department of Health and Human Services; and Dr. Antony Rosen, vice dean for research and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Attendees had opportunities to network, view exhibits and demonstrations, and hear talks and panels that covered three impact areas:

• Realizing the Promise of Health Sciences
• Engineering the Future of Medicine
• Delivering Health Everywhere

The 2019 event summary is available at https://www.jhuapl.edu/Content/documents/NHSymposium.pdf.