SwatTalks

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SwatTalks is an Alumni Council program that brings the talent and expertise of Swarthmore alumni, faculty, and staff to the greater College community through free, virtual seminars. Each SwatTalk lasts one hour and is available through Zoom. SwatTalk sessions will be recorded as permitted by the presenters.

 

Upcoming SwatTalks:

“Artificial Intelligence and Medicine: Promise and Peril” with Rachel Thomas ‘05

May 12 AT 8 P.M. ET

Advances in Artificial Intelligence are transforming many fields, including medicine and immunology. Some of these breakthroughs are beneficial, such as identifying promising new drug candidates, predicting T cell binding, and detecting diseases in retinal images. But AI can also amplify risks and cause harm, particularly when its implementations centralize power and ignore crucial perspectives from those closest to the task—mirroring rather than correcting existing power imbalances in the medical system.

Rachel Thomas ’05 is a pioneering AI researcher. Through her work co-founding fast.ai in 2016, she helped create the longest running deep learning course in the world and was recognized by Forbes as one of 20 incredible women in AI. She was also the founding director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco, was an early data scientist at Uber, and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Duke. Now, Rachel is back in school, pursuing a Ph.D. in microbiology, with the goal of applying her machine learning and data ethics expertise to the field.

Please join Rachel for a conversation about the history of AI, the exciting opportunities for AI in medicine, the risks of what can go wrong, and the positives that occur when people from unlikely backgrounds get involved. 

Register for “Artificial Intelligence and Medicine: Promise and Peril” with Rachel Thomas ‘05

 

Watch Recordings of Past SwatTalks

 

Accommodations & Questions 

If you require accommodations to participate in this webinar, please contact alumni@swarthmore.edu at least 24 hours in advance for assistance.

If webinars are permitted to be recorded, they will be made available on the SwatTalks recordings page at a later time.

If you have any technical difficulties with Zoom, please contact help@swarthmore.edu.

Speaker Recommendations

To suggest a future panelist, please email us at swattalk@swarthmore.edu.