Visiting Lecturer Series – Dr. Sirisha Rambhatla

Achieving AI Readiness in Canadian Healthcare: Overcoming Challenges for Trustworthy Innovation

Lecture Takeaways

The main takeaways are as follows:

• AI’s Potential to Transform Healthcare: Using examples from applications in liver transplantation and burn surgical candidacy, and their crucial role in training medical professionals, especially for highly skilled tasks like surgical procedures. Role of LLMs in clinical workflows and challenges posed by healthcare misinformation.
• Challenges in Implementing AI in Healthcare: What do we need in terms of compute, expertise, and data strategy? Will use an example from an ongoing collaboration with a community hospital to illustrate the real-world challenges.
• Building a Unified AI Strategy for Healthcare: Roadmap for faster adoption of research results, improved data transparency for patients, and providing a model for AI integration in healthcare systems globally.

Biography

Dr. Sirisha Rambhatla is the Director of the Critical Machine Learning (ML) Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Management Science and Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo (UW) with cross-appointments in Systems Design Engineering, and the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. Her research focuses on developing reliable ML and artificial intelligence (AI) models for critical real-world decision-making in surgery, transplantation and healthcare, intelligent manufacturing, and aviation using computer vision, time-series and spatiotemporal modelling, representation learning, and explainable AI. With her research supported by industry and clinical collaborations, Dr. Rambhatla brings her ML/AI expertise to build the next generation of theory-guided data-driven solutions for the real world. Her interdisciplinary work spanning both theory and practice of ML, has been published at top ML venues such as ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, and clinical venues such as AMIA, Urology Clinics North America, Surgery, and American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. Recipient of the 2021 Merit Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Research at the University of Southern California across Science and Engineering, Dr. Rambhatla received her Ph.D. and Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities in 2019 and 2012, respectively, where she was the recipient of the E. Bruce Lee Memorial Fellowship.

No sign-up is required. For more information, contact the iBEST coordinator at ibest@torontomu.ca.