CrickConnect and the British Heart Foundation are delighted to invite you to join us at an exclusive panel discussion: AI & Life Sciences; what's at stake?

Whichever way you look in today’s society, AI is playing an increasingly prominent role. And no more so than in the Life Sciences - from bench to bedside. The panel will explore & debate the revolutionary impact of AI on science whilst exploring the challenges that exist to eliminate bias & ensure diversity in the models AI works with.

For this in-depth discussion, we have drawn an expert panel from across the Crick and BHF alumni and friends, and are excited to be joined by the BBC Health and Science Correspondent James Gallagher, who will lead the conversation.

Each of our panellists offer a different perspective on advances in AI and the ethical implications from bench to bedside;

Dr Aylin Cakiroglu | Lead Machine Learning researcher, Cosyne Therapeutics

Aylin is a mathematician with a passion for developing machine learning methods for biomedical data to understand complex disease. After a PhD in graph theory with Peter Cameron at Queen Mary University of London, she joined the Francis Crick Institute as post doctoral fellow in Nick Luscombe’s group studying how overlapping and often competing signals are encoded in our DNA.  She continues as consultant to the Francis Crick institute to grow an ecosystem around the application of AI in biomedical research.

Aylin will soon be starting an exciting new position at Cosyne Therapeutics, and in her previous role as AI scientist at BenevolentAI she created new methods to extract information from scientific literature and clinical data for drug discovery. 

Aylin cares deeply about equality and equity in biomedical research, from building diverse teams to understanding how under-representation in biomedical data impacts some populations’ access to healthcare and treatment. 

Professor David Leslie | Director of Ethics & Responsible Innovation Research, The Alan Turing Institute, and Professor of Ethics, Technology & Society, Queen Mary University

David is the Director of Ethics and Responsible Innovation Research at The Alan Turing Institute and Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society at Queen Mary University of London. He previously taught at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, where he also participated in the UCHV’s 2017-2018 research collaboration with Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy on “Technology Ethics, Political Philosophy and Human Values: Ethical Dilemmas in AI Governance.”

David is the author of the UK Government’s official guidance on the responsible design and implementation of AI systems in the public sector. he is also on the editorial board of the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR) and is a founding editor of the Springer journal, AI and Ethics.

David's current research focuses on digital ethics, algorithmic accountability, explainability, and the social and ethical impacts of machine learning and data-driven innovations. In his wider research, he studies the moral and ethical implications of emerging technologies. In particular, he is keen to question how the biospherically and geohistorically ramifying scope of contemporary scientific innovation (in areas ranging from AI and synthetic biology to nanotechnology and geoengineering) is putting pressure on the conventional action-orienting categories and norms by which humans, at present, regulate their behaviour.

Professor Paul Leeson | Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of Oxford, and Founder & Chief Medical Officer, Ultromics

Paul is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford and a Consultant Cardiologist. His research group has pioneered the application of computational modelling and artificial intelligence to imaging in clinical cardiology research and works on some of the largest imaging studies in the world.

Novel insights generated by the group have ranged from how pregnancy complications alter the hearts of both mothers and their children, to how the structure of blood vessels differ in the brains of young people with high blood pressure.

Innovations arising from the research led to the spin out of Ultromics from the group in 2017. The company has now brought some of the first AI-driven diagnostic aids in cardiology through regulatory clearance into clinical use in hospitals across the US and UK.