Alumni
Entrepreneurship
Human Responsibility in AI
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“We need to understand that we are part of it, and a central part of it,” said Boston College professor Leonard Evenchik, SB ’77, SM ’79, when speaking about artificial intelligence during the 2024 MIT Sloan Reunion.
Evenchik spoke during a session entitled “AI in Healthcare: The Generative Algorithm Will See You Now,” one of many discussions that addressed the polarizing and pressing topic of AI. These sessions either touched on or thoroughly explored the use of AI in industries such as health care, entrepreneurship, tourism, and agriculture.
Human Responsibility in AI
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Ting-Chih Shih, MBA '09, Founder and CEO of ClickMedix “As more patients come through, [the ClickMedix app] is just getting smarter.”
Caring for patients using AI
"AI in Healthcare” also featured panelists Dr. Leo Anthony Celi, SM ’09, MIT senior research scientist; Tim Valicenti, MBAn ’18, MBA ’24; and Dr. Steven Zweibel, EMBA ’23, system director of cardiac electrophysiology at Hartford HealthCare. The session was moderated by Dr. Carl Dahlberg, SF ’17, president of Dahlberg Healthcare Solutions.
Discussing both the risks and benefits of using AI in health care, the panelists emphasized the role of human responsibility. The dangers of AI are largely dependent on how we choose to use and interact with it. AI can be used to perform numerous tasks in health care, such as communicating information to patients, reading radiology images, suggesting diagnoses, and creating staff schedules. These benefits could be particularly useful in under-resourced health care settings in which staff do not have the time to perform these tasks. However, AI’s limitations and potential downfalls include gender and racial biases, diagnostic errors, and lack of regulation.
“The interesting debate here is the pace that we push this forward in health care, given that it could cause harm, but it could also save a lot of lives,” remarked Valicenti.
Celi emphasized that we would need to take many precautions and set up many systems to ensure that AI is used in a responsible way in health care. He recommends making systemic changes to health care that promote equity and developing regulations on AI in health care. Physicians and other health care professionals also have the collective responsibility of educating each other about AI.
“We need to educate everyone to have some basic understanding of AI,” said Celi.
The interesting debate here is the pace that we push [AI] forward in health care, given that it could cause harm, but it could also save a lot of lives.
The power of AI in education
AI education is especially important at MIT Sloan. In “AI in Education and Research at MIT Sloan,” Eric So (Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Management) spoke about how MIT Sloan is using AI to educate students as well as how we are educating students and faculty to use AI.
So is the faculty lead for the MIT Sloan Generative AI Hub for Teaching and Learning, which provides AI education to students, faculty, and the public. The hub’s current activities include a public webpage with AI educational resources. So also teaches a course that trains faculty to teach AI skills and how to use AI tools such as chatbots. Planned activities include a peer-to-peer AI education program for faculty, an AI bootcamp for incoming MBA students, and new student courses on developing skills in AI.
Through his work teaching the faculty course on AI, So has gained new insights on how to train others to use AI.
“These classes were in person, and this was quite necessary because I think a big portion of the learning curve for working with AI really requires you to be hands-on, to make some mistakes, to learn from those mistakes, and try to improve,” explained So.
The new student courses on AI will also be vital to preparing MBA students for the workforce.
“The real risk to our students is not that they are replaced by AI, but rather that they are replaced by someone who knows how to better use AI,” said So.
The real risk to our students is not that they are replaced by AI, but rather that they are replaced by someone who knows how to better use AI.
Alumni and AI entrepreneurship
During Reunion’s “IM2M: Ideas Made to Matter” and “MIT Sloan Innovation Showcase” sessions, alumni demonstrated their knowledge of AI and how they’re using it to improve their industries and contribute to social good. “MIT Sloan Innovation Showcase” presenters Bayazid Malikov, MBA ’23, co-founder of Tailbox, and Julián Ortiz, MBA ’19, co-founder of AdaViv, pitched their startups that are using AI to change the travel and agriculture sectors, respectively. “IM2M” speaker Ting-Chih Shih, MBA ’09, discussed how she founded ClickMedix, an AI-powered disease management platform.
Malikov has found AI to be a particularly useful tool for connecting people with different cultures. His company, Tailbox, is an app that uses AI to provide its users with immersive audio experiences from museum exhibits. Tailbox, which Malikov co-founded with Eduardo Schuch, MBA ’23, will create audio platforms for museums to enable them to attract app users and museum customers.
“What we want to do with museums is create these audio stories and build a platform for the museums basically for free to acquire users,” commented Malikov.
AdaViv, Ortiz’s company, tackles the issue of agricultural productivity. The platform was also co-founded by former MIT postdoctoral researchers Ian Seiferling and Moe Vazifeh. AdvaViv uses AI to provide insight and mentorship to fruit and vegetable farmers, improving their job performance and productivity. AdaViv uses computer vision to provide farmers with data on employee performance as well as pests and diseases in plants.
“We use deep learning to better allocate resources every day in [farmers’] daily work,” said Ortiz. “And we use LMS [learning management system] so we can communicate this to farmers.”
Shih’s company, ClickMedix, utilizes some of the benefits of AI that were alluded to during “AI in Healthcare.” ClickMedix uses AI to communicate diagnostic information to health care providers all over the world in areas that lack access to medical specialists. International local health care providers who use the app input diagnostic patient information into the app, which is transmitted to a specialist. The specialist then makes a diagnosis and gives treatment instructions that are communicated to the local health provider. The app also generates follow-up instructions for diagnosed patients.
“As more patients come through, it's just getting smarter,” Shih said of the app.
ClickMedix has also expanded to include AI power analytics, care management, patient engagement ads and billing, and financial telehealth integration.
I encourage each of you to look for your Petrov moment in the world that comes, because you may have one.
AI and our future
Malikov, Ortiz, and Shih are examples of alumni who have used AI responsibly. They have used their knowledge of AI and their industries to create AI products that positively impact others.
During “AI in Healthcare,” Dahlberg cautioned that all of us will need to take AI responsibility and ethics seriously in this society of rapid technological change. He mentioned the example of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who was in the Soviet Air Defense Forces during the Cold War. Petrov decided not to report the information from a Soviet detection system that indicated that the United States was launching an airstrike against the Soviet Union. If he reported the information, the Soviet Union would have launched a nuclear strike against the United States. Petrov correctly determined that the detection system’s information was inaccurate, saving the world from nuclear destruction.
“I encourage each of you to look for your Petrov moment in the world that comes, because you may have one,” said Dahlberg.
