AI for Science: Discovering Diverse Classes of Governing Equations in Medicine and Beyond

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers the promise of revolutionizing the way scientific discoveries are made and significantly accelerating their pace. This is important for numerous fields of study, including medicine. In this talk, I will present our research on AI for science over the past few years. I will start by briefly showing how we can discover closed-form prediction functions from cross-sectional data using symbolic metamodels. Then, I will introduce a new method, called D-CODE, which discovers closed-form ordinary differential equations (ODEs) from observed trajectories (longitudinal data).This method can only describe observable variables, yet many important variables in medical settings are often not observable. Hence, I will subsequently present the latent hybridisation model (LHM) that integrates a system of ODEs with machine-learned neural ODEs to fully describe the dynamics of the complex systems. However, ODEs are fundamentally inadequate to model systems with long-range dependencies or discontinuities. To solve these challenges, I will then present Neural Laplace, with which we can learn diverse classes of differential equations in the Laplace domain. I will conclude by presenting next research frontiers, including recent work on discovering partial differential questions from data (D-CIPHER). While these works are applicable in numerous scientific domains, in this talk I will illustrate the various works with examples from medicine, ranging from understanding cancer evolution to treating Covid-19.

Our Speaker

Mihaela van der Schaar is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London. In addition to leading the van der Schaar Lab, Mihaela is founder and director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM). 

Mihaela was elected IEEE Fellow in 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Oon Prize on Preventative Medicine from the University of Cambridge (2018), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004), 3 IBM Faculty Awards, the IBM Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award, the Philips Make a Difference Award and several best paper awards, including the IEEE Darlington Award. 

Mihaela is personally credited as inventor on 35 USA patents (the majority of which are listed here), many of which are still frequently cited and adopted in standards. She has made over 45 contributions to international standards for which she received 3 ISO Awards. In 2019, a Nesta report determined that Mihaela was the most-cited female AI researcher in the U.K.