Earlier this week, I got sent a set of interview questions to help make a short speaker video for a conference I’m attending later this year. The questionnaire included a ton of different topics. I thought it might be good to just write out my thoughts real quick here and then try to distil the best of that brainstorming into a 3 minute video later today. My plan is to give the questions a quick once over and then circle back to each of them a couple times to really make sure they get all of the consideration they deserve.
Answer all of the following:
Introductory Questions
Q: Name, company, job title
A: Dr. Nels Lindahl, a fortunate 10 company, Director – Clinical Systems
Q: A bit about what you do
A: Every day I work to help solve meaningful problems in the healthcare space.
Q: A bit about your AI background
A: Thanks to my quantitative background including Ph.D. level statistics I was able to jump in and start taking advantage of all the open source software available. That quantitative background helped me feel comfortable to jump in and do any training I could find to help learn how to apply AI to everyday business problems. I’m well over 40 certificates or badges at this point 😉
Answer 2-3 of the following:
AI-related Questions
Q: What excites you the most about AI?
A: Possibility. Opening the door to new insights and data driven decisions is so powerful. The open source community has really democratized the first push and made it easy to breakdown the barriers that would have prevented AI at scale.
Q: What are you most looking forward to at Ai4 Healthcare?
A: Talking to people and learning about what inspires them to push things forward.
Q: What does AI mean to you?
A: AI to me is the applied application of programing to problems where intelligence, learning, simulation, or modeling benefit the process. That is probably a more nuanced answer than building or modeling human type cognition with a digital space.
Q: Who is the ideal person to attend your talk?
A: Anyone who is thinking about how to apply machine learning concepts to real world problems. Anybody that is daring to wonder how do we scale this up in an applied way to start solving problems.
Q: How do you interact with AI on a day-to-day basis?
A: My entire day is spent around huge data sources and data streams that face challenges and provide opportunities to really dig in and understand problems in meaningful ways. All my spare time is spent digging into TensorFlow notebooks and learning python.
Q: What sparked your interest in AI?
A: Back in 1998, I started learning LISP and wanted to do amazing things that just were not possible at the time. Now the power of open source libraries have opened the door to all those things that seemed out of reach.
Q: Where do you see AI bringing the Healthcare industry?
A: It is entirely possible that AI is going to drive the Healthcare industry to highly customized applications of drug therapies and away from formulary based management. That change toward customization in the pharmacy world will fundamentally change clinical trials and how we think about applied medicine. Imagine treatment based on a mapping of your specific genome resulting in custom printed tablets vs. treatments that generally worked at a specific strength during clinical trials.
Q: What impacts do you think AI has already had on the Healthcare industry
A: Speed to market for new treatments is facing real public pressure. All of the news reporting around how AI can be used to speed up drug development creates pricing and speed pressures within a marketplace that was already tightening.
Answer 1-2 of the following:
Fun Questions
Q: What is the best vacation you have ever taken?
A: One of the first vacation I had to Rocky Mountain was just really fantastic. The weather at the time combined with the beautiful scenic views of mountain trails was really majestic.
Q: What is your favorite thing to do outside of work?
A: Reading. It is ok to make reading your hobby today. I give you full permission.