April 9, 2024
Harry's guest this week is Raffi Krikorian, chief technology officer and managing director at Emerson Collective, the social change organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. Krikorian is the former vice president of engineering at Twitter (now X), where he was responsible for getting rid of the Fail Whale and making the company’s backend infrastructure more reliable; the former director of Uber's Advanced Technology Center in Pittsburgh, where he oversaw the launch of the world's first fleet of self-driving cars; and then the chief technology officer at the Democratic National Committee, where he helped rebuild the party's technology infrastructure after the Russian hacking debacle of 2016. At Emerson Collective, Krikorian built the technology organization, leads the development of data products, and works to upgrade the back offices of the non-profits Emerson works with. On top of all that, he recently launched a podcast called Technically Optimistic, where he’s taking a deep dive into the way AI is challenging us all to think differently about the future of work, education, policy, regulation, creativity, copyright, and many other areas. The show is a must-listen for anyone who cares about how we can build on AI to transform society for the better while minimizing the collateral damage. Harry talked with Krikorian about why he moved to Emerson Collective, why and how he started the podcast, and what he really thinks about what government should be doing to prepare for the waves of social change AI will bring.
59 min 27 sec
10.25.19
This week Harry talks with Chris Boone, a leader of Pfizer's effort to use new types of real-world data on patients—from insurance claims to lab tests to molecular profiles to data from wearable health sensor—to speed up drug discovery, development, and testing.
37 min 21 sec
8.9.19
Harry talks with the CEO and president of Beth Israel Lahey Health, the product of Lahey Health's merger this spring with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and several other hospitals in the Boston region. How does Dr. Tabb manage change inside a growing organization that—by his own admission—has to build and implement new tools, processes and the actionable data it needs to evolve beyond the fee-for-service era.
35 min 39 sec
5.17.19
Harry talks this week with Salesforce's vice president of strategic research, Peter Coffee. The computer-industry veteran and former tech columist says that in the era of 1) outcomes-based payments for medical care, 2) an aging patient base, and 3) ubiquitous sensors and continuous data collection, there's a huge opportunity—and financial incentive—for healthcare providers to employ technology platforms that improve the client experience.
45 min 25 sec
4.26.19
Harry speaks with Boston University’s Rhoda Au, who believes that algorithms parsing new kinds of digital data about individual patients could find warning signs of diseases like dementia while they’re still preventable—leading to a new era in which precision medicine is gradually replaced by “precision health.”
40 min 03 sec
4.12.19
Harry has a heart-to-heart conversation with Dr. Kathryn Teng, who’s working to use data to implement an access- and experience-based population health model at MetroHealth, the public health system for Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
39 min 59 sec
3.29.19
Harry gets an update on the merger of AI, robotics, and high-throughput chemistry in the new "self-driving laboratory" from University of Toronto theoretical chemist Alán Aspuru-Guzik.
31 min 20 sec
3.15.19
This week Harry learns about the power of individualized molecular diagnostics for cancer patients from N-of-One founder Jennifer Levin Carter.
42 min 49 sec
3.1.19
Dr. Mark Boguski argues in this week's episode that diagnostic management teams consisting of physicians from diverse specialties, including genetics and genomics, can integrate data from different specialties and improve patient care.
38 min 15 sec
2.15.19
Sandy Aronson from Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine argues that "algorithm-enhanced care" is helping physicians make better decisions.
42 min 17 sec
2.15.19
Harry talks wth Geisinger's Dr. Aalpen Patel about machine-learning algorithms that can help radiologists read CT scans and speed up diagnosis of urgent conditions.
35 min 03 sec
2.1.19
Harry's guest in this episode is Massimo Buscema, director of the Semeion Research Center in Rome, Italy, and a full professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. Buscema researches and consults internationally on the theory and applications of AI, artificial neural networks, and evolutionary algorithms. The conversation focuses on AI and its applications in healthcare, and how it can enhance what we can see and uncover what we cannot.
37 min 08 sec
1.18.19
Harry's guest for this episode is Dr. Barrett Rollins, the chief scientific officer and faculty dean for academic affairs at Boston's Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Linde Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Harry and Dr. Rollins dig into how large-scale DNA analysis can one day put much more usable information into the hands of oncologists, and how that data affects individual patients, the practice of medicine, and new therapies under development.
30 min 35 sec
1.4.19
Harry's guest this week is Dr. Joel Dudley from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he serves as executive vice president of precision health, associate professor of genetics and genomic sciences, and founding director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare. Dr. Dudley explains how his group is utilizing data to uncover health problems that can't be detected through normal methods, as well as his groundbreaking paper on the link between Alzheimer's disease and herpes.
29 min 00 sec
How does an expert in pharmacokinetics, whose only exposure to computers was taking one semester of programming in college to meet a language requirement, become an advocate for the new AI-driven style of drug discovery? This week Harry finds out from Mark Eller, who helped to invent Allegra at Hoechst Marion Roussel (now Sanofi), spent 12 years at Jazz Pharmaceuticals; and is now senior vice president of research and development at twoXAR, an AI-driven drug discovery startup.
42 min 27 sec
