As artificial intelligence continues to evolve at a rapid pace, especially in the realm of health care, the Cedars-Sinai Department of Computational Biomedicine announced today that it’s established the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education.
The center’s scientists plan to apply AI, and its subset machine learning, to genomic research, personalized medicine and other health care research applications, according to a press release.
Jason Moore, who joined Cedars-Sinai in 2022 as chair of the department of computational biomedicine, will serve as the center’s director.
Tiffani Bright, a national leader in applied clinical informatics, has been selected as co-director. She’s the first Black woman in the country to earn a doctorate in biomedical informatics, which she obtained from Columbia University, where she also did her undergrad work. She was the first Black Columbia student to earn a doctorate in that field as well.
Prior to joining Cedars-Sinai, Bright was the biomedical informatics evaluation team lead for the Center for AI, Research, and Evaluation at IBM Watson Health.
Cedars-Sinai is a nonprofit academic health care organization that began in 1902 as a 12-bed hospital in the Angelino Heights neighborhood. More than a century later, it serves more than 1 million people annually in over 40 locations, with more than 4,500 physicians and nurses and 1,500 research projects.
The new AI center will look to create new algorithms and methods for detecting and correcting biases in AI results, with the goal of making sure that any models used in Cedars-Sinai’s clinics treat all patients equally.
In terms of the AI software that’s being developed at the center, it’s what known as open-source, so Cedars-Sinai ultimately releases it for free to the worldwide research and clinical communities.
Bright said that the center will place a strong emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion in research and education programs to “ensure that solutions are accessible and relevant to all communities,” according to the release.
The training component will include workshops, educational software and opportunities for graduate study.
