“It won’t be in the Olympics anytime soon but Oki Mek considers artificial intelligence “a team sport.” As the chief artificial intelligence officer for the Department of Health and Human Services, Mek may be a little biased, but as his agency works through its AI strategy — released in January — collaboration and knowledge exchange will be paramount.”
“The strategy aims to promote AI adoption, and to ensure that algorithms are fair, legal and ethical. Three core pieces of the strategy are adoption and bringing the entire department up to speed on the language of AI; scaling best practices, and accelerated adoption. As for the first piece, Mek said culture change plays a pivotal role.”
“’The main risks here is not AI itself, it’s not the technology itself, it’s more of a culture shift. It’s getting away from that industrial culture, more into a data-centric digital culture. Because the two obstacles in AI that we’re going to face [are] data acquisition, because health data is quite heavily regulated, but also data processing — formatting the data and tagging the data,’ he said during a web event hosted by ACT-IAC on Tuesday.”
“It’s important to educate and train all of HHS on what AI and machine learning are — their respective principles, what are bots, what is robotic process automation — to ensure everyone is on the same page before the organization moves forward. Then, HHS can see what is valuable and risky with regards to AI, he said.”
“HHS has 107 AI use cases in flight right now, and Mek’s office wants to see where commonalities exist to bridge some of those projects and avoid duplicative efforts. These can be things such as grants, supervised and unsupervised learning, reinforcement training or even genomic research…” Read the full article here.
Source: HHS AI strategy hinges on culture shift, knowledge exchange – By Amelia Brust, October 21, 2021. Federal News Network.
