Ethical Data

This week, Elina is joined by James Kugler, Chief Digital Officer of Merck. James received his Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, USA. A passionate bioinformaticist / computer scientist, he has pursued several research activities at the MIT and Harvard Medical School to gain greater understanding of health sciences and technologies.

While completing a Ph.D. program, James received an attractive job offer as a corporate strategist and planner with Sigma Aldrich (part of the Merck Group since 2015) where he led the development of a scientific collaboration platform. In 2012, he became Head of Global New Product Development & Introduction and was responsible for the harmonization and streamlining of the product development process. In 2014, he became Director Global Digital Marketing and was responsible for the largest eCommerce platform in the life science industry. At the age of 28, he was appointed Chief Digital Officer of Merck. With his "disruptive" way of thinking, he leads a global unit in the digital age and is responsible for Merck's digital transformation worldwide.

James and Elina discuss:

• Commercialisation of data in healthcare
• Security of data and collaboration
• Digital ethics
• Regulation v contextualisation
• Data as an enabling infrastructure
• Traceability: The importance of infrastructure of the data
• Data sets do not tell the whole story
• Trustworthiness of data sources

This week, Elina Naydenova is joined by Dr Shane Gordon, Director of Strategy, Research and Innovation at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust and Dr Ashish Singh, an AI developer and Junior Doctor at East Sussex and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, who's keen on developing digital aspects of healthcare delivery.

Elina, Shane and Ashish discuss the future of AI and technology in the NHS, and how regulation and practical needs and pressures impact innovation. Ashish suggests that maybe it's time we stopped calling it AI and Shane talks about why we must starting before we're ready, rather than waiting for perfect plans, to make real impact. 

This week, Elina Naydenova is joined by Brhmie Balaram, Head of AI Research & Ethics for NHSX. She leads the Lab’s AI Ethics Initiative, which supports research and practical interventions that complement and strengthen existing efforts to validate, evaluate and regulate AI-driven technologies in health and care. Her focus is on addressing the inequalities that can emerge from the ways that AI-driven technologies are developed and deployed.

Elina and Indra discuss the AI trust problem, ethics and regulation, and creating a model for impact assessment with the Ada Lovelace Institute.  

This week, Elina Naydenova is joined by Dr Indra Joshi, Director of AI for NHSX and the lead on the creation of the NHS AI Lab. Indra oversees digital health initiatives within the NHS with a focus on data, standards, evidence and AI Policy and she has a unique portfolio with experience stretching across policy, digital health, national project strategy and implementation; whilst remaining true to her professional training as an emergency medic.

Elina and Indra discuss the origins of the AI lab, where AI can help clinicians, shifting the narrative on what to celebrate when it comes to AI, the fundamentals of data, policymaking in AI and much more.

This week, Elina is joined by Dominique Airey, Partnerships Director at Feebris, to discuss a recent paper published by The Lancet, titled 'Health data poverty: an assailable barrier to equitable digital healthcare.' 

Can digital health technologies transform healthcare and provide everyone, everywhere with equitable access to expert-level care? Can they narrow the global health and wellbeing gap? Or is it highly possible that these transformative technologies could exacerbate existing healthcare inequalities instead?

Health data poverty is the inability for individuals, groups or populations to benefit from a discovery or innovation due to a scarcity of data that are adequately representative. Is this lack of representation a threat to global health? How do we ensure that nobody gets left behind in the digital era?

Welcome to episode one of our brand new podcast, Ethical AI. This week, Elina Naydenova is joined by two members of the machine learning team at Feebris.

Rafah El-Khatib is the ML Research Lead and a machine learning engineer by background, passionate about AI for Good. She has academic and industry experience in the fields of Information and Coding Theory (PhD), Finance, and Healthcare and is skilled in predictive modelling, Bayesian networks, deep learning, model interpretability, and unsupervised learning. Gareth Jones is the ML Team Lead focused on productising and maturing AI models to extract disease biomarkers from physiological signals.