Kristin Hanson, Aug 12
During his senior year as an undergraduate at Yale, Drew Prinster completed a global health certificate program. His capstone project focused on the use of AI tools to predict patient diagnoses and improve health care quality. But as he conducted his research, he noticed that there were virtually no guardrails in place guiding the development of these tools. Unlike with pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, there has been very little government policy or wider consensus on standards to ensure the safety and security of AI deployments in health care.
“My optimism for AI’s potential in health care shifted toward prioritizing the question, ‘How do we ensure responsible deployments of this technology in the health care field?’” Prinster recalls.
Now a fourth-year PhD student in computer science at Johns Hopkins, Prinster is still addressing questions about the safe use of AI in health care. Those questions are central to his work as a doctoral fellow in the JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI (AI2AI). The Whiting School program, which launched in 2022, is a novel industry-academia partnership designed to advance technologies in machine learning, computer vision, natural language understanding, and speech processing.
Amazon has a longstanding relationship with the Whiting School, says Sanjeev Khudanpur, director of the AI2AI program and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. The company has collaborated with the school’s faculty for well more than a decade. Khudanpur himself worked on the speech recognition functionality that eventually went into the Amazon Echo.
“[AI2AI] took those one-off interactions and formalized them into a program where two things happen: They bring us interesting problems for us to work on, and we use our ideas and thinking to solve problems and do research that they can’t always pursue,” says Khudanpur, who also directs the Center for Language and Speech Processing.
This partnership is especially timely, as securing diverse funding for large-scale academic research programs is increasingly important. Industry investment plays a vital role in developing the ideas that will shape the way we live and work with AI—and the people who will make those discoveries.
Central to the program are the AI2AI doctoral fellowships, which provide a year of funding for Whiting School doctoral students like Prinster. To apply, PhD students write a research statement that summarizes their AI focus area. While successful applications usually correlate with one of Amazon’s research interests, the fellow’s research remains self-directed. Each fellow is matched with an Amazon liaison, a company scientist who provides feedback and ideas, and they are encouraged to collaborate over the course of the fellowship.
Read more: https://engineering.jhu.edu/news/research-meets-reality/
