“AI captures our values and interests, but also our biases”

Every year, students attending the Introduction to Bioinformatics course have the opportunity to listen to different experts working in the field to get in touch with the applications and future challenges of this computational science.

The first guest speaker of this academic year was Paula Petrone, associate professor and Biomedical Data Science team leader at ISGlobal. Petrone holds a PhD in Biophysics from Stanford University and is currently a digital health startup consultant, mentor and activist on ethics and diversity issues in STEM careers.

Petrone’s presentation revolved around Artificial Intelligence: what it is, its applications and some of its main risks. As she helps organize the Women in Data Science Barcelona, she also mentioned the gender biases affecting the AI algorithms –and other discriminations such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status or location. Later, Petrone focused her explanation on how AI is being used in the biomedical and bioinformatics field and the possibilities.

In the second part of the talk, Paula Petrone expounded on how she got to be an AI expert through her career journey. She shared with the students what has been her professional background up until now; she told them there is always something to learn about every experience and encouraged them to find their niche of expertise and enhance it with different points of view.