14-year-old takes centre stage at Hamilton innovation conference

A 14-year-old whiz kid had the rapt attention of 150 researchers, scientists and industry leaders as he told a Hamilton innovation conference about how artificial intelligence can transform health care.

“Health care is perfect for AI and AI is perfect for health care,” said Tanmay Bakshi, Toronto algorithmist and software developer. “It can save millions of lives.” AI is already all around us, explained the young IBM champion and honorary cloud adviser to the annual Innovation Nation conference Sunday at LIUNA Station.

“We’ve probably all used AI today but we just don’t realize it,” he said.

“If you’ve opened your email or gone to Netflix or YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, you are using the power of AI.”

But Bakshi believes where it will make the biggest difference is health care, in part because the field has the huge amounts of data required for AI to be most effective.

“AI loves data, specifically deep learning algorithms,” said Bakshi. “It’s what they love to feed on and find really subtle patterns in this huge data.”

Finding subtle patterns could be the difference between preventing depression before a patient becomes suicidal or missing the signs of depression altogether, said Bakshi.

“Why AI can be so impactful is because humans aren’t very efficient at understanding that data,” he said.

Even adding a bit of efficiency can go a long way toward allowing health care providers “to work faster, to get care to more patients and higher quality care as well.”

Bakshi was one of more than two dozen speakers ranging from a NASA leader to the CEO of Hamilton Health Sciences to a songwriter to a comedian.

Every year, the free conference put on by Hamilton’s Centre for Surgical Invention and Innovation brings together the general public and leading innovators particularly in health care.

“Artificial intelligence in the field of health care is inevitable,” said Bakshi.

“When you combine the huge amount of data, the human inefficiency and the fact that there are not the humans to do it in the first place, AI becomes the perfect technology for this incredible field.”

The World Health Organization estimates a global shortage of 12.9 million health care workers by 2035. Bakshi says AI can play a big role in filling that gap.

“A lot of people have this very common misconception that it’s meant to replace us,” he said.

“AI is meant to overpower us, overtake us, it’s meant to become more intelligent than us, become conscious and self aware on its own.

“But all of these fears simply aren’t true.”

He said AI is key to keeping Canadians “healthy, safe and sound.”

“Artificial intelligence is not meant to replace us,” he said.

“In fact the very fundamental purpose with which it was developed is that since it was created by humans, it should amplify our skills, our capabilities, what we do all day and augment our lives to allow us to do more, better and more efficiently.”