Events

October 7, 2021 at 4:00PM - 5:30PM

Dr. Stephen Wolfram  –  creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research – will speak about the computational future and biomedicine. Dr. Wolfram will share a roadmap for recentering biomedicine around computation and give insights into harnessing data driven science to transform the biomedical landscape. This should be a relevant and an illuminating talk from one of the foremost leaders in computational health.  

September 23, 2021 at 4:00PM - 5:30PM

Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, former member of the FDA’s Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee who resigned over the agency’s approval of Aducanumab, will speak about the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway, how it is implemented, and how it was applied in the controversial Aducanumab case – which he dubbed the “worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history.” Dr. Kesselheim will also give suggestions for the future. This should be a fascinating talk with wide implications for all future accelerated drug approval pathways.

September 17, 2021 at 09:30AM - 10:30AM

Most interpretable machine learning research focuses on explaining the outputs of black-box models. A different, and promising, approach is to use machine learning to find the simplest possible model that meets certain performance criteria; this is the pursuit of symbolic regression. In this talk I will discuss the concepts of interpretability and explainability, and how they are used in the machine learning world. I will then discuss a pre-print that will be published in the Neurips Datasets and Benchmarks track later this year. In it, we attempt to benchmark many different approaches to symbolic regression on hundreds of problems in order to determine the strengths and weaknesses of current methods. I will discuss what lies ahead and implications for how clinicians and patients receive and process models that increasingly appear in the health system.   This event is only open to Boston Children's staff. If you would like to attend the Zoom details, please email CHIP@childrens.harvard.edu. 

July 22, 2021 at 3:00PM - 4:00PM

The Delta (B.1.617.2) variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has rapidly emerged as the dominant strain spreading in many countries worldwide. Dr. Ben Reis led a discussion reviewing the latest findings on the Delta variant, with a focus on the effectiveness of approved COVID-19 vaccines against this emerging viral strain. Dr. Reis reviewed the evidence available from scientific publications, preliminary studies and public health reports, in the context of the inherent challenges involved in real-world vaccination effectiveness studies. He discussed the lessons learned from the nation-wide mass-vaccination experience in Israel and other highly vaccinated countries such as the UK, and provided an update on how these countries are responding dynamically to the threats posed by this emerging variant.  

May 11, 2021 at 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Dr. Gao will discuss the following article: Gao, Bien, and Witten (2020). Selective inference for hierarchical clustering. arXic:2012.02936. This journal club is only available to the BCH community. If you would like to be sent a calendar invite please email chip@childrens.harvard.edu. 

April 29, 2021 at 5:00PM - 6:30PM

In an age where technology appears to rule supreme, it is easy to forget that our relationship with technology is complicated. Just as humans shape technology, it shapes us in return. It is also easy to only see things through the lens of the technologies we have to hand, and build solutions that ill fit reality. Electronic health records for example demand that clinical work bends to the needs of documentation, with the end result being burnt out clinicians who do anything but what they were taught at medical school. Algorithms built with our cleverest machine learning methods just end up making concrete the biases implicit in their data sets. Seeing human systems like healthcare as sociotechnical systems helps us understand these unintended consequences, and gives us a different lens to understand technology design and use.

April 13, 2021 at 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Dr. Beam led a discussion on the following article: Tom B Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, et al. Language models are few-shot learners. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.14165 [cs], 2020. Dr. Beam also discussed results from his group that evaluates this model on medical applications. 

March 16, 2021 at 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Dr. Ben Reis will lead a discussion on the recent New England Journal of Medicine paper he co-authored, providing the first real-world study of effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. It was the largest study yet to quantify the impact of the vaccine outside the confines of a clinical trial. The study used innovative epidemiological methods to analyze vaccine effectiveness for preventing symptomatic diseases, severe illness and death. Dr. Reis will discuss his study and the lessons learned from the nation-wide mass vaccination experience in Israel. The study has been featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Fortune.

March 1, 2021 at 4:00PM - 5:30PM

Privacy has become a central focus of policy debates in every context. In this talk, Lessig argues that we’re conceiving of the problem in a fundamentally flawed way. Offered is a different framework, radically different but critically better. Or so it is hoped.

February 23, 2021 at 2:00PM - 3:00PM

James will lead a discussion on approaches to addressing racial equity concerns with clinical algorithms, including for arthritis severity (Pierson et al. 2021) and kidney function estimates (Diao et al. 2021):