Dinner Speech: Robert Murphy (School of Life Sciences - LifeNet): "The model’s the thing"

Biomedical research has made enormous strides over the past sixty years, beginning with the discovery of DNA structure and the genetic code, undergoing an enormous boost with the development of genetic engineering methods, and most recently with automated high throughput instruments and personal genome sequencing.  During the same period, the field of artificial intelligence has exploded, with machine learning systems overpowering chess and Jeopardy champions alike.  Biomedical research and machine learning are increasingly combined, as computational methods are applied to analyze data streaming from automated instruments.  I will present some examples of this confluence, from “brain-reading” machines that can decipher what we are thinking about from images of our brain activity, to systems for predicting what diseases we are likely to get from our DNA sequences.  This will be followed by discussion of the resulting changes in the meaning and role of models in research, especially if the human scientist is no longer the consumer of data from experiments.