Lecture 11:

This talk was about how AI is changing the face of healthcare. AI is now more
advanced than ever due to the recent upsurge in research of neural networks.
According to the guest lecturer, AI has become very relevant in the healthcare
industry due to the aforementioned advancement of AI. This to me is very
fascinating as I did not know that AI is very much trained to detect skin diseases
such as melanoma and problems with eyes such as glaucoma. AI can be upto
approximately 80% accurate while training itself to make such predictions. Machine
learning is is therefore being implemented in the discovery of new antibiotics,
too. This got me very interested since I am very inclined towards learning about
how to implement machine learning and deep neural networks in the medical field. In
fact, this may be something that I shall pursue in the near future. When it comes
to deep learning, one can say that it began with a fundamental problem, namely the
"vanishing gradient", which was discovered in 1991. This simply means that the
deeper the neural network is (more hidden layers), the harder it is to train it.
This sort of problem mainly occurs in recurrent neural networks, but can also occur
in a convolutional neural network and a feed-forward neural network. Since AI is a
very new field, it may take a lot of time to properly introduce it into the medical
field. There are actually three different types of neural nets one can use to train
AI, namely RNN (recurrent neural net, which is used for processing sequential
data), CNN (convolutional neural net, which is used for image recognition), and FNN
(feed-forward neural net, which is used for image classification).

Regarding the way the lecture was presented, its style and presentation was
incredibly structured and organized. The speaker explained the concepts of using
machine learning and deep learning in the medical field for the purpose of drug
discovery. This lecture was definitely well-suited for the target audience due the
simplicity of the subject matter as a whole. What I personally found most
interesting was the fact that one can use AI to cure other people by discovering
new forms of drugs to prevent diseases such as COVID-19. Overall, this topic seems
quite interesting and I may perhaps follow it soon.