NEWS On Thursday, March 25, WASP-HS, a national research program which explores artificial intelligence and society, is to host an online conference about healthcare and AI.
Helena Lindgren, Virginia Dignum (both Umeå University) and Francis Lee, Chalmers, are some of the speakers at WASP-HS digital reference meeting.
ImageMontage“WASP-HS community reference meetings are an important instrument for multidisciplinary interaction between researchers, and public and private organisations to learn and discuss challenges and opportunities for collaboration in different sectors. Visionary, yet realistic, applications of AI to healthcare and medicine challenges, are human-centred in nature, and thus require a multidisciplinary approach, such is at heart of WASP-HS, says Virginia Dignum, professor at Umeå University and program director of WASP-HS.
Keynote speaker Maja Fjaestad, Sweden’s State Secretary to the Minister for Health and Social Affairs, will lead off a series of discussions on person-centered care, artificial intelligence and biomedical data, and robotics in clinical environments. Conference participants include representatives from several universities, public and private healthcare and information technology companies.
“We hope that this meeting of people from different fields will allow us to see artificial intelligence in bioscience in a new light,” says Francis Lee, a Principal Investigator for WASP-HS and Associate Professor in Technology and Social Change at the division for Science, Technology and Society at Chalmers University in Gothenburg. “We have convened a roundtable of people from academia and industry, including scholars from science and technology studies, medicine, computer science, sociology, philosophy, and organisational studies.”
After Fjaestad’s speech, four roundtable discussions are to tackle some of the latest challenges to computing in medicine. These discussions include:
Harmonising diverse patient data for person-centered care
Chair: Ericka Johnson, Professor, Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), Linköping University; Co-chair: Katherine Harrison, Senior Lecturer, Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), Linköping University
Data work in biomedical AI: the hidden challenges of data, pretraining, and ground truths
Chair: Francis Lee; Co-chair: Magnus Boman, Professor, Division of Software and Computer Systems, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Citizen’s perspective on human-centered AI for illness prevention
Chair: Helena Lindgren, Professor, Department of Computing Science, Umeå University; Co-chair: Ingeborg Nilsson, Professor, Department of Community Medicine and Rehabilitation, Umeå University
Social robotics and trustworthy human-robot interaction in healthcare
Chair: Ginevra Castellano, Professor in Intelligent Interactive Systems, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University; Co-chair: Katie Winkle, Digital Futures Postdoctoral Research fellow, Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
After the roundtables, participants will try to draw conclusions from the day’s dialogue, and make them public, in order to contribute to the national conversation on the use of computing in healthcare.
WASP-HS was initiated by the Wallenberg Foundations, who are investing up to 660 million Swedish kronor (about 65 million euros) over 10 years, to analyse ethical, economic, labor market, social, and legal aspects of technological transition in society. The program includes almost 30 research projects, a national graduate school with up to 70 doctoral researchers, at least 11 new research groups across the nation, and support for 12 visiting professors.
WASP-HS’s vision is to support and strengthen outstanding research, from the perspective of humanities and social sciences, dealing with the effects, opportunities, and challenges of the integration of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems into communities and people’s everyday lives. WASP-HS creates interdisciplinary research environments, doctoral schools, and a national network to contribute knowledge, highlight key issues, and engage citizens and other societal actors. WASP-HS also aims to create cooperation with Sweden’s public and private sectors.
