This summer the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new flagship initiative, the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity, or AIM-AHEAD.
The initiative seeks to quell common biases that beset biomedicine and aims specifically to redress two glaring deficits identified by the NIH: a lack of diversity among artificial intelligence researchers and a lack of representation from various segments of society in the data available to support machine learning and the implementation of artificial intelligence in the health domain.
The Coordinating Center includes 14 investigators from around the country, among them Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Toufeeq Ahmed, PhD, MS, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics, who’s one of nine investigators for the center’s Leadership Core, and Bradley Malin, PhD, Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics and Computer Science, who’s one of three investigators for the center’s Infrastructure Core.
Under the leadership of Drs. Toufeeq and Malin, VIGH member Martin Were, MD, associate professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine will focus on software infrastructure to facilitate artificial intelligence and health disparities research.