The New 'American AI Inititiative'

Tom Mitchell, Interim Dean of the school of Computer Science and CMNI faculty, weighs in on how the government could help support the future of AI research.

...

“I think we need, and suspect will get, more than symbolic support,” Mitchell says. One key place where the government could get involved in the field is using artificial intelligence to help improve medicine. AI has already shown itself to be good at doing things like reading X-rays or even potentially speeding up how fast an MRI machine can run, but it could also help look for patterns at a larger scale.

Consider all the electronic medical records at hospitals across the country. Using machine learning algorithms to look for patterns in those files could potentially help experts “discover better ways of treating diseases,” Mitchell says. Figuring out how to make that data shareable, while also respecting patient privacy, is a job that the government could help with because it’s a project that’s much bigger than just one hospital. “Then it’s not a technology problem, so much as it’s an organizational problem,” he says. Read more