While a lot of the news around AI is doom and gloom, the potential for positive innovation in health care offers a hopeful perspective. Hosts Beth Coleman and Rahul Krishnan are joined by University of Toronto experts Christine Allen and Andrew Pinto to talk about the transformative power of AI in health care, from revolutionizing primary care to advancing drug development.

About the hosts:

Beth Coleman is an associate professor at U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/) and the Faculty of Information. She is also a research lead on AI policy and praxis at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/). Coleman authored Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds (https://k-verlag.org/books/beth-colem...) using art and generative AI.

Rahul Krishnan is an assistant professor in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science (https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/) and department of laboratory medicine and pathobiology in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine (https://temertymedicine.utoronto.ca/). He is a Canada CIFAR Chair at the Vector Institute, a faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a faculty member at the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine (T-CAIREM https://tcairem.utoronto.ca/).

Guests

Andrew Pinto is the founder and director of the Upstream Lab (https://upstreamlab.org/), a research team focused on addressing social determinants of health, population health management, and utilizing data science for proactive care. Pinto is a family physician at St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health Toronto, and associate professor in the department of family and community medicine in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Christine Allen is a professor in U of T’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy. She is a member of the scientific leadership team of the Acceleration Consortium (https://acceleration.utoronto.ca/) at U of T. Allen is a co-founder and CEO of Intrepid Labs Inc. (https://intrepidlabs.tech/), a company that is accelerating pharmaceutical drug development through integration of AI, automation and advanced computing.