ABOUT

The Mark Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University have joined forces to accelerate cancer research. The Mark Foundation Workshop: Accelerating Innovation at the Intersection of AI and Cancer Research is a 2-day conference focused on applying AI to cancer research in the most innovative ways. This workshop will tackle three critical areas to advance cancer research:

The format of the workshop will be highly participatory.  Attendees will form interdisciplinary, cross-institutional groups to develop original research concept proposals.  Through The Mark Foundation’s ASPIRE Awards program, The Mark Foundation will fund at least one proposal for a project up to $250,000.

KEYNOTE

Stephen Friend will deliver the keynote address: How semi-ubiquitous smart phones and wearables, empowered by AI, might enable an augmented self that could navigate individual symptom trajectories for chronic medical conditions within communities interested in sharing data and insights by each other, for each other.

Stephen Friend is a visiting Professor of Connected Medicine at the University of Oxford, Chairman of Sage Bionetworks, and President and Founder of the charity 4YouandMe. His breakthrough approaches from discovery of the first cancer susceptibility genes in the 1980s at Harvard and MIT, to prototyping how knowns can be used to query unknowns at the start-up he launched (Rosetta Inpharmatics), to his time as a SVP at Merck and Co Inc. leading the Oncology efforts, to co-founding and leading the charity Sage Bionetworks that enables collaboration between researchers and participants, to The Resilience Project in 2014, through to his work at Apple 2015-2017 as a member of the Health Special Projects Team in building out the “ResearchKit” Apps, all have at their center – a desire to change how we work and why we do what we do in preventing disease. Friend has previously held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Washington School of Medicine, and the Icahn School of Medicine. He received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, his Ph.D. in biochemistry and his M.D. from Indiana University.