In each episode, your hosts explore machine learning and data science through interesting (and often very unusual) applications.
The data science and artificial intelligence community has made amazing strides in the past few years to algorithmically automate portions of the healthcare process. This episode looks at two computer vision algorithms, one that diagnoses diabetic retinopathy and another that classifies liver cancer, and asks the question—are patients now getting better care, and achieving better outcomes, with these algorithms in the mix? The answer isn’t no, exactly, but it’s not a resounding yes, because these algorithms interact with a very complex system (the healthcare system) and other shortcomings of that system are proving hard to automate away. Getting a faster diagnosis from an image might not be an improvement if the image is now harder to capture (because of strict data quality requirements associated with the algorithm that wouldn’t stop a human doing the same job). Likewise, an algorithm getting a prediction mostly correct might not be an overall benefit if it introduces more dramatic failures when the prediction happens to be wrong. For every data scientist whose work is deployed into some kind of product, and is being used to solve real-world problems, these papers underscore how important and difficult it is to consider all the context around those problems.
Highlighted Episode:
May 17 – 2020: Protecting Individual-Level Census Data with Differential Privacy:
The power of finely-grained, individual-level data comes with a drawback: it compromises the privacy of potentially anyone and everyone in the dataset. Even for de-identified datasets, there can be ways to re-identify the records or otherwise figure out sensitive personal information. That problem has motivated the study of differential privacy, a set of techniques and definitions for keeping personal information private when datasets are released or used for study. Differential privacy is getting a big boost this year, as it’s being implemented across the 2020 US Census as a way of protecting the privacy of census respondents while still opening up the dataset for research and policy use. When two important topics come together like this, we can’t help but sit up and pay attention.
