October 9 – 11, 2024 | In person at Duke University
JB Duke Hotel, 230 Science Drive, Durham, NC 27708

Registration is open to everyone, including faculty, students, and staff at Duke and other academic institutions, as well as healthcare professionals, industry professionals, and business professionals. Please join us!

Overview

Duke AI Health and the Pratt School of Engineering are partnering to host the Duke Summit on AI for Health Innovation with the goal of fostering a community of practice around health-oriented AI development, that bridges the medical and engineering fields. 

This event will leverage the strengths of Duke in AI product development and the ecosystem for healthcare innovation, harnessing responsible AI in the service of patients and communities for better health. To enhance the impact of our discussions and collaborations, the summit will integrate the principles of design thinking into its programming. This approach will guide participants through a process of empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing, ensuring that solutions are user-centered and more readily deployed once developed.

The summit, to be held on the beautiful Duke campus in Durham, North Carolina, will include extensive Duke student engagement and opportunities for participants to engage with the large community of AI development including industry partners, venture capital, and startups.

Register here: https://events.duke.edu/innovation-summit-2024

Focus of the Event

Engineers think about the world in a special way. What can an engineering mindset teach us about defining opportunities and creating innovation in the world of health? AI is disrupting technology, but it is also disrupting how we create new innovations and holds the promise of harnessing AI as a companion to human thinking. This event was designed to help participants think differently about clinical problems: both in defining problems and designing solutions. AI will change the way that we do research and design, as well as commercialize, license, and share innovation. This event has a “wide aperture” in framing possibilities from molecules to bedside to community, and how design innovation and technology can help us in what to do about them.

Three-Day Event Format

Day 1 (Wednesday, 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM)

• Keynote by Richard Shannon, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Quality Officer, Duke Health
• Introduction to design thinking and the broader framework of design innovation and technology with Steve McClellan, Director of the Christensen Family Center for Innovation
• Learning session on Duke experiences in clinical AI, facilitated by Ricardo Henao, Associate Processor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics
• Interactive break-out sessions around health-related problem spaces
• Networking session highlighting Duke students and educational programs
• Lunch and refreshments will be provided

Day 2 (Thursday, 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM)

• Learning session on industry experiences in health AI, facilitated by Jonathan Owens,
• Learning session: Duke experiences in computational medicine, facilitated by Amanda Randles, Director of the Duke Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation
• Interactive break-out sessions around design and innovation techniques
• Networking session highlighting companies and product sharing
• Lunch and refreshments will be provided

Day 3 (Friday, 9:00 AM – 1:30 PM)

• Hands-on workshop in applied design innovation and technology with Steve McClelland, Director of the Christensen Family Center for Innovation
• Reflection and sharing session, facilitated by Shelley Rusincovitch, Managing Director of Duke AI Health
• Lunch and refreshments will be provided

Who should attend

This summit is for people who want to:

• Explore the development process from concept to finished product through hands-on educational experiences and interactive discussions with experts, incorporating design thinking methodologies.
• Actively participate in setting the agenda for future work, using insights gained from a design thinking approach to identify user needs and create impactful solutions.
• Network with students and representatives from industry, medicine, academia, and funders, fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations.
• Engage with fellow attendees to identify open problems, generate new ideas, and spark innovation through collaborative and user-centered approaches.

We especially encourage participation from industry, academia, government, and the local community.

Registration

Register here: https://events.duke.edu/innovation-summit-2024

The registration fee for the Summit is $375 and includes lunch for each day.  We are able to offer a set number of seats at a discount for members of nonprofit organizations ($150), and registration is free to current students with a valid ID at Duke or other institutions. All fees are payable through the registration site.

All fees are non-refundable. Once we reach maximum registration, we will maintain a waitlist, and will contact those on the waitlist as spots become available. *All student tickets have been claimed. Please join our active waitlist here.

Sponsorship

We thank Johnson & Johnson and Globant – Healthcare & Life Sciences for being our founding sponsors.

Opportunities for sponsorship are still available and are structured as follows:

• Bronze-level sponsorship ($2.5k): Includes invitation for the sponsor to display an information table
• Silver-level sponsorship ($10k): Named sponsorship of a coffee break, plus invitation for the sponsor to display an information table
• Gold-level sponsorship ($25k): Named sponsorship of a meal, plus invitation for the sponsor to display an information table
• All sponsors receive 2 free registrations

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jonathan Owens, MBA, Director of Industry Partnerships for the Pratt School of Engineering (jonathan.owens@duke.edu)

Growing our Community of Practice

Health AI is a rapidly evolving field, rife with innovations that often move it in unexpected directions. In this summit, we will also emphasize how Health AI also bridges two fields – medicine and engineering – that each demand specialized knowledge and have complex structures of rules and procedures that must be navigated.  In such a context, formal education and training is necessarily incomplete, and practitioners must independently problem solve and teach themselves in order to remain competitive.  Our vision is that this becomes an ongoing community of practice to advance the overall field by explicitly incorporating the design thinking methodology as a consistent yet flexible framework that each participant can take back to their home organizations to move innovation forward. 

Bios

Ricardo Henao, PhD, Associate Director of Clinical Trials AI, Duke Clinical Research Institute. A quantitative scientist whose research focuses on the development of novel statistical methods and machine learning algorithms primarily based on probabilistic modeling, Dr. Henao’s expertise spans several fields, including applied statistics, signal processing, pattern recognition, and machine learning. His methods research targets hierarchical or multilayer probabilistic models to describe complex data for the purposes of hypothesis generation and improved predictive modeling. Most of his applied work is dedicated to the analysis of biological data such as gene expression, proteomics, medical imaging, clinical narrative, and electronic health records. His recent work has been focused on the development of sophisticated machine learning models, including deep learning approaches, for the analysis and interpretation of clinical and biological data with applications to predictive modeling for diverse clinical outcomes.

Jerry Lynch, PhD, Vinik Dean of Engineering. Lynch is an expert in the field of advanced sensing and information technologies for monitoring and control of civil infrastructure systems and is an advocate for community engagement in research. He is also a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) Engineering Mechanics Institute and led the University of Michigan’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as department chair from 2017 to 2021. His research program advances cyber-physical system architectures that combine sensing, computing and control to create intelligent civil infrastructure systems. He is best known for his pioneering work in structural health monitoring that allows the performance and health of civil infrastructure systems to be assessed based on monitoring data to improve system safety and resilience. To elevate the impact of his research, he co-founded and directed the Urban Collaboratory at the University of Michigan, an interdisciplinary research institute that partners with community stakeholders to define challenges and to develop sustainable solutions based on smart city technologies and socially-engaged design methods. Lynch also has extensive experience commercializing engineering technologies. He holds three U.S. patents, has two patents pending and has founded two companies – Civionics and Sensametrics – to implement commercial applications of his research.

Steve McClelland, Director of the Christensen Family Center for Innovation. Steve is passionate about products and technology. He loves building teams and inspiring creativity. He co-founded a Boston-based, internet consulting company that designed and built solutions for clients ranging from content management to cache-routing systems. He moved to San Francisco in 2004 to join a second startup, Citizen Sports. He served in many roles there, including head of engineering, chief architect, and VP of User Experience. Citizen Sports made mobile and social sports applications for iOS, Android, and Facebook. Citizen Sports was acquired by Yahoo! In 2010, where he ultimately served as VP of Product Management focused on content and personalization. Steve joined Twitter in 2016 as Director of Product Management, managing product teams in onboarding new customers, native and web clients, and publishing platforms. Steve returned to Duke in 2017 where he now serves as the Director of the Christensen Family Center for Innovation in Duke’s Engineering school.

Jonathan Owens, MBA, Director of Business Development and Industry Partnerships, Pratt School of Engineering. Jonathan joined Duke following an extensive career in industry with a focus on technology transfer & commercialization, strategic alliances, intellectual property, new business creation, and innovation. Prior to joining Duke in late 2022, he worked for more than 15 years at LORD Corporation in roles of increasing responsibility, including being named the General Manager and Director of the Global Business Unit he started by successfully commercializing technology originally developed for the Aerospace Industry into Energy Industry applications. In his last role prior to leaving LORD, he was appointed the Global Operations Growth and Innovation Director for the fastest growing business unit in the company, which was focused on electrical vehicle applications, supporting over $200M in capital projects across 6 plants in four countries.

Michael Pencina, PhD, Chief Data Scientist, Duke Health. Dr. Pencina is an internationally recognized authority in the evaluation of AI tools and algorithms. Guideline groups rely on his work to advance best practices for the application of algorithms in clinical medicine. He is actively involved in the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical studies with a focus on novel and efficient designs and applications of machine learning for medical decision support. He interacts frequently with investigators from academic and industry institutions as well as regulatory officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Widely noted as an expert on risk prediction models, Dr. Pencina has authored or co-authored 400 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited over 111,000 times. He co-founded and co-chairs Duke Health’s Algorithm-Based Clinical Decision Support (ABCDS) Oversight Committee and serves as co-director of Duke’s Collaborative to Advance Clinical Health Equity (CACHE). He spearheads Duke’s role as a founding partner of the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) whose mission is to increase trustworthiness of AI by developing guidelines to drive high-quality health care through the adoption of credible, fair, and transparent health AI systems.

Amanda Randles, PhD, Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Randles’ research is in biomedical simulation and high-performance computing, focusing on the development of new computational tools used to provide insight into the localization and development of human diseases ranging from atherosclerosis to cancer. She received the Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health in 2022. Dr. Randles directs the Duke Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation.

Shelley Rusincovitch, MMCi, FAMIA, Managing Director of Duke AI Health. Ms. Rusincovitch is an informaticist and technical leader who specializes in healthcare applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, data modeling, and data science experiential learning. She has more than 20 years of experience in clinical research including clinical trials, registries, and health system data warehousing and is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). Ms. Rusincovitch serves as the managing director of Duke AI Health, a multidisciplinary, campus-spanning initiative housed within the Duke University School of Medicine and designed to connect, strengthen, amplify, and grow multiple streams of theoretical and applied research on artificial intelligence and machine learning at Duke University in order to answer the most urgent and difficult challenges in medicine and population health. She also serves as an adjunct instructor in software and web development at Durham Technical Community College.

Richard Shannon, MD, Senior Vice President, Chief Medical Officer, and Chief Quality Officer for Duke Health. Shannon received his BA from Princeton University and his MD from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He completed his training in internal medicine at Beth Israel Hospital, his cardiovascular training at Massachusetts General Hospital, and was the Francis Weld Peabody Fellow and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School before becoming the Claude R. Joyner Professor of Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine.

Additional bios will be added with speaker confirmations.

Learn more at https://aihealth.duke.edu/2024-innovation-summit/

Event Team

This event is directed by Shelley Rusincovitch (Duke AI Health) and Jonathan Owens (Pratt School of Engineering)