Veridical data science and alignment in medical AI

The next statistics seminar will be presented by Prof. Bin Yu from UC Berkeley.

Title: Veridical data science and alignment in medical AI

Abstract : Alignment and trust are crucial for the successful integration of AI in healthcare including digital twin projects, a field involving diverse stakeholders such as medical personnel, patients, administrators, public health officials, and taxpayers, all of whom influence how these concepts are defined. This talk presents a series of collaborative medical case studies where AI algorithms progressively become, from transparency to more opaque thus with increasing difficulty of alignment assessment. These range from tree-based methods for trauma diagnosis, to LLM-based emergency department co-pilot, and mechanistic circuits for structured data extraction from pathology reports. They are guided by Veridical Data Science (VDS) principles—Predictability, Computability, and Stability (PCS)—for the goal of building trust and interpretability, enabling doctors to assess alignment. The talk concludes with a discussion on applying VDS to digital twins and medical foundation models and next steps for evaluating AI algorithm alignment in healthcare.

Bio : Bin Yu is CDSS Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Statistics, EECS, and Computational Biology, and Scientific Advisor at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, all at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the practice and theory of statistical machine learning, veridical data science, and solving interdisciplinary data problems in neuroscience, genomics, and precision medicine. She and her team have developed algorithms such as iterative random forests (iRF), stability-driven NMF, and adaptive wavelet distillation (AWD) from deep learning models. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, IMS President, and delivered the IMS Rietz and Wald Lectures and Distinguished Achievement Award and Lecture (formerly Fisher Lecture) of COPSS. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from The University of Lausanne.