2025-03-16 –, Main Stage
Beyond the Black Box Algorithm: Health data and the public good
The absence of well-curated, well-labeled, shareable data has blunted AI’s transformational potential in health. Existing data sets are often controlled by or accessible to only a handful of researchers, drawn only from limited settings such as the ICU, or from limited or biased population samples. While nearly one in three Americans has at least one device to track sleep, steps or other data on health or fitness, mechanisms to combine these data with important information in electronic health records or from devices like blood sugar monitors are limited and costly to build. Companies developing predictive health algorithms keep their code secret, making validation or improvement difficult, and preventing the setting of benchmarks or testing to see whether one works better than another.
This talk proposes an alternate vision of a health data commons, and a new platform to enable the aggregating and sharing of data to revolutionize the development, testing and deployment of clinical biomarkers in research and practice. The talk will also touch on allied issues: patient empowerment and protection, the shift from "e-patient" to "AI-patient," and the need for transformative funding models to match this new vision of the health data commons.
Daniel Wolfe is Executive Director of the UCSF UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health (CPH), which is pioneering a new discipline joining the power of AI, clinical/public health excellence, and equity. Wolfe was a 2023 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center resident for work advancing good governance and responsible use of artificial intelligence, and received the Revson Fellowship for individuals who have made a substantial contribution to the city of New York..
He was previously a director of the Public Health Program at the Open Society Foundations, working in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe to support health, human rights, and access to medicine for marginalized populations. He has been a senior consultant at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, community scholar at Columbia University’s Center for History and Ethics of Public Health, and was Director of Communications at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the largest and oldest AIDS organization in the United States. He is the author of book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed and popular publications including Drug Safety, Future Virology, the International Journal of Drug Policy, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Medical Ethics, the International Herald Tribune, the Lancet, Lancet Global Health, the Nation, and the New York Times Book Review. Wolfe holds a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, and a Masters in Public Health and a Masters in Philosophy from Columbia University.