News

WASP-HS highlighting healthcare and AI

Published: March 23, 2021

On Thursday, March 25, WASP-HS is to host an online community reference meeting about healthcare and AI.

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. The 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.”

“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.

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 AI in healthcare.