A Letter from Dr. Ashirbani Saha
Dr. Saha is first holder of the BRIGHT Run Breast Cancer Learning Health System Chair, a permanent research position established by the BRIGHT Run in partnership with McMaster University.
Hello BRIGHT Run Family,
Hope you had a great fall season. I always find the fall season mesmerizing; the surroundings are resplendent with the variety of changing colors while we gear up for winter.
In my last letter, I expressed my concern about the delay regarding the arrival of some equipment. I am glad to share that the equipment has arrived and is currently being used to run experiments. Besides running experiments, I am also working to develop ideas and execution details for other projects. Each project now uses a different type of data (e.g. digital image as opposed to tables containing clinical information of patients) and tries to exploit a different data source (e.g. clinical trial data vs. administrative healthcare data)
As I talk about data and artificial intelligence (AI), let’s look at something seasonal to apply those. I will share some ideas about data, artificial intelligence, and Santa Claus together.
Santa Claus accomplishes a mammoth task in the holiday season. He oversees the elves who help in the making and packing of toys and manage his reindeer and sleigh. Often, to select the right kind of toy for a child, he needs to read the letter that he receives at his North Pole office. He also has the task to evaluate the yearly conduct of children and determine if they were naughty/nice. Then comes the daunting task of delivering the gifts. Santa has an estimated 500 million households to visit in 42 hours (tough job!). He needs to do this silently so that no one can detect him (this gets tougher!).
There are thoughts about using AI to help Santa. One example would be to help Santa decide who has been naughty or nice by sharing information about their conduct. This information/data could be text data in the form of notes about the behavior of the child or some video/image data collected over previous years and labelled as naughty or nice by Santa himself.
Then, we can help Santa by training an AI model to learn from the text/image/video and corresponding labels together (this is called supervised learning) and Santa can use this model on this year’s data to automatically determine Naughty/Nice!
Could we help him in his toy factory and with delivery? We can do more: AI-driven management of elves and optimal task division using the schedules of each elf (tabular data), using language processing tools to read the letters (text data) and identify the gift, place online orders (through Alexa or Siri? possible) for raw materials, and use robots in packing toys (robots have vision; so use of image/video data).
Could he leave the delivery to robots, then? Well, technically he can, but the children expect him and he loves to deliver by himself. We can design some self-driven or hybrid sleigh for him (let’s give the reindeer some rest) to make his job easier. Of course, we can still track him (NORAD Santa tracker, Google Santa tracker to name a few).
Well, that’s about helping Santa. If you are looking for more ideas regarding AI and Christmas, learn more here.
I wonder if Santa is already using AI in his own way to make his work easier, like most of us do!
Let’s keep watch this Christmas Eve while we enjoy the holidays with our friends and family!
With Season’s Greetings,
Ashirbani
