Should artificial intelligence be allowed to make care decisions for patients? Though the long run of AI may conjure up doomsday visions of robots and computers intent on rendering human existence superfluous, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) addressed questions surrounding the usage of AI in health through their inaugural summer program focused on educating highschool students. 

The Jameel Clinic Summer Program, which took place July 10-21, accepted a complete of 51 students from primarily Boston-area schools, with a commitment to reaching students from diverse backgrounds.  

This system, which split students up into two cohorts of 25 students for every week, had core offerings including courses like “Intro to Python,” “Intro to Clinical AI,” and “Intro to Drug Discovery” while also facilitating trips to numerous local institutions corresponding to the Museum of Science Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Amgen. 

“Organizing this boot camp had a private significance to me. When my family immigrated to Israel, it was tough — my parents and I worked minimum wage jobs to survive,” School of Engineering Distinguished Professor and Jameel Clinic AI faculty lead Regina Barzilay recalls. “Going to school transformed my life. Most of the students in this system have similar backgrounds. I hope that exposing them to exciting science at MIT will open recent opportunities for them.” 

“I’m not presupposed to be here today,” stated Collin Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor at MIT and Jameel Clinic principal investigator, on becoming each a pc scientist and cardiologist. In his lecture, Stultz spoke of the hardships his parents endured after immigrating to Recent York from Jamaica. He emphasized that he and his members of the family had never thought to use to varsities like Harvard University, pondering of it as a faculty for “people just like the Kennedys” until Stultz got the concept to use from a classmate who was planning to use.  

“It’s my hope that the interactions between students within the Jameel Clinic Summer Program and MIT faculty will highlight the wealth of opportunities available on the intersection of computer science and medicine,” Stultz says. 

Consequently of a generous gift from Joseph Bates and Kristin Loeffler through their AI for Humanity Foundation, the Jameel Clinic was in a position to offer the summer program for free of charge and reduce the financial barriers for college kids from under-resourced backgrounds. Bates shared that on the age of 13 he was discovered by a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University and have become the primary teenager to enter the university. “I had been doing an adequate, but not good, job in a dangerous Baltimore City public junior highschool,” Bates says. “Being at Hopkins was wonderful, socially and intellectually, and it led me to a pc science PhD at Cornell University, then CS professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Someone taking an interest really mattered, and it modified my life.” 

In keeping with the National Science Foundation, the U.S. STEM workforce regularly diversified between 2011 and 2021, with increased representation of girls and underrepresented students of color. But within the college-educated workforce, a 2021 report showed that just 16 percent of engineers were women and 16 percent of underrepresented students of color — Hispanic, Black, and American Indian or Indigenous Alaskan individuals — were employed in science and engineering occupations with a minimum of a bachelor’s degree. 

Angely Mejia Martinez, a rising junior at Chelsea High School and aspiring doctor, highlighted Jameel Clinic chair and MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp’s talk as considered one of her favorites. Sharp spoke about growing up on a small farm in rural Kentucky before setting off on his profession in science, which eventually led to his 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. “I actually got inspired by that because once I was little, many individuals would say ‘I don’t think you possibly can do that,’ and I used to be all the time like ‘I can do that,’” Martinez says. “I feel I can achieve anything I set my mind into.” 

“It was very surreal because I didn’t think I’d be here,” Priyani Rawal, a rising junior studying information technology at Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School, says. Rawal’s favorite class was Barzilay’s Intro to AI/ML lecture. “I used to be so amazed by what we were learning … it made me inspired to enter [the machine learning] field.” 

Adam Nouri, a rising senior at Pioneer Charter School II, signed up for this system after receiving an email from his computer science teacher. Before applying, Nouri had considered enrolling in a summer course for programming at Bunker Hill Community College, an option typically offered for free of charge to Pioneer students. Nonetheless, Nouri quickly realized that free enrollment was only available in the course of the school 12 months and says it could have cost around $800 for him to enroll in the summertime. If he hadn’t gotten into the Jameel Clinic Summer Program, Nouri believes he would have continued working at his part-time service job for the remainder of the summer while attempting to code a game or construct a pc together with his friends in his free time. “Once I got into the [Jameel Clinic Summer Program], I used to be actually really excited,” Nouri recalls. “Now I feel like I actually have a clearer path I would like to pursue.” 

As a part of their final group project presentations given on the last day of this system, students were assigned AI tools utilized in clinical settings or drug discovery, like PathAI or AlphaFold2, and asked to clarify their assigned tool together with its potential advantages and risks to a target market of their selection. 

“There’s a heavy emphasis placed not only on innovation in science, health care and technology, but additionally on collaboration across disciplines,” Jay Ananth, a rising junior at Troy High School, says. “Through the summer program, I used to be taught AI and health care not as a highschool student, but as a peer — a fellow researcher — who has the power to innovate and make a change.” 

Serena Hu, a rising junior at Lincoln Sudbury High School, felt less uncertainty about her future after attending this system. “I all the time desired to try recent things in order that I could find something that I really like to do, but I can pretty confidently say that I discovered it here,” Hu says. “They’re not only teaching you the fabric — they’re also inspiring you.” 

The Jameel Clinic Summer Program was organized by Ignacio Fuentes, Alex Ouyang, and Marinalva Smith. Maggie Wang, Antonella Catanzaro, and Ciarra Brodie helped to oversee and contribute to the success of this system. Instructors included Pulkit Agrawal, Sharifa Alghowinem, Shrooq Alsenan, Manisha Bahl, Regina Barzilay, Rebecca Boiarsky, Felix Faltings, Florian Fintelmann, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Susan Hockfield, Insoo Hyun, Noah Jones, Ila Kumar, Peter Mikhael, Carles Monterrubio, Tiffany Pereira Portela, Phillip Sharp, Hannes Stärk, Vinith Suriyakumar, Oliver Thiel, Randi Williams, Jeremy Wohlwend, and Rachel Wu.