UNICC’s Shashank Rai, Senior Strategic Technology Specialist, CPS, presented at an ITU/WHO workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Health in Lausanne, Switzerland on 22 January 2019.
Attending organizations included ITU, WHO and UNICC; EPFL, Switzerland; The Lancet, United Kingdom; Fraunhofer HHI; Baidu Inc.; Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, China; NHS England; All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS); Solutions 4 Health; Georgetown University; PHI (Philanthropic & Humanitarian Initiatives).
Topics ranged from Focus Group on AI for Health, Data Availability, Benchmarking and Security to Regulations and Country Priorities for use of AI for Health.
The workshop provided a platform for researchers, engineers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policy makers to discuss standardization opportunities for the assessment of AI for health solutions and to identify use cases and data required for the evaluation and validation with open benchmarks. Shashank’s session discussed existing AI initiatives in countries, related AI strategies, AI adoption maturity models, and priority health use cases that can benefit from AI for Health. The session also highlighted the need to align the health solutions with WHO global goals for health in terms of health outcomes, scalability and inclusiveness
UNICC’s presentation emphasized that ‘Digital Trust’ is beyond technology controls (with some reference links in the slides). The ITU Focus Group is working on quantifying and looking to resolve multi-dimensional aspects related to AI such as security, privacy and regulatory; ‘Digital Trust’, which is the bedrock for the Focus Group to succeed, is a layer above these tangible aspects.
When the Focus Group looks at ‘Regulations and Country Priorities for use of AI for Health’, it has to take into account on how to establish ‘digital trust’ across borders. The presentation also gave examples of two projects where UNICC has worked with UN agencies in building solutions; where the global community had ‘Digital Trust’ in the UN Agency.
More information is available at:
- Sessions overview at ITU – https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/ai4h/20190122/Pages/programme.aspx
- The ITU-T Focus Group (FG-AI4H) has recently been established with the aim of working towards a standardized assessment of AI-based solutions for health, in close partnership with WHO: https://itu.int/go/fgai4h.
