I believe that artificial intelligence is the next great frontier of technological advancement. Its cognitive abilities are able to analyze vast amounts of data and present us with insights that we would never have been able to discover on our own.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its subsets, Machine and Deep Learning all have applications in a variety of different sectors including the automobile, finance, and manufacturing industries. Its most impactful applications, I think, lie in the medical industry: both the clinical side as well as research. AI is already being used in this sector with numerous examples such as the da Vinci surgical robot, which is used to assist surgeons in complex surgeries, or a model created by students at MIT to detect breast cancer from a mammogram.

There are still so many other processes that can be made more efficient, or more accurate using AI. Just from my experience in a lab, I could already see procedures that are currently performed by a postdoc, that could easily be replaced with a robot with AI. Some examples include the whole process of DNA extraction from a fish fin (including the fin clip), identification of muscle cells with centrally located nuclei, and identification of fish with disorganized muscle structure when viewed under polarized light. Even data analysis could be replaced with artificial intelligence. This would allow the researchers to spend more time using their expertise toward designing new experiments, writing and publishing papers, or running complex tests. AI would also likely cut down the costs associated with and the time required to conduct an investigation, speeding up the rate of cure discovery.

This summer, my interest in AI led me to an online course created by Microsoft which taught you the basics of AI, and how to use their Azure software for creating and deploying your own models. In this course, I was able to develop tools that would predict something based on the inputted data. One example was a software that could predict if you had diabetes based on various different factors such as age, weight, gender, blood glucose level, etc. I was incredibly amazed that software so powerful as to predict with 95% certainty that you had diabetes based on data points is available to consumers for free. I can only imagine what the cutting edge software must be able to do.

I plan to continue to learn and build my expertise in the field of artificial intelligence because I believe that it will start to play a role in everything that we do. From the food industry to space exploration; whether we like it or not, AI will be all around us.