For over a decade, Amy has been interested in understanding how the human brain works in order to better diagnose, prognose and treat neurological disease and injury. Quantitative approaches, including machine learning, applied to (sometimes big) data from rapidly evolving neuroimaging techniques, have the potential to enable ground-breaking discoveries about how the brain works. Amy has particular interest in non-invasive brain stimulation and pharmacological interventions, like psychedelics, that may be used to modulate brain activity and promote recovery from disease or injury. Amy is a co-director of the AI core for the Ann S. Bowers Women's Brain Health Initiative, an institute spanning several top academic centers that is poised to shed light on the mystery that is the female brain. The initiative will focus on understanding how the brain is changed by oral contraceptives, pregnancy, motherhood, menopause and aging/dementia. Finally, Amy is the founder and co-director of the cross-campus working group Machine Learning in Medicine, which aims to bring together ML/AI researchers in Cornell-Ithaca/Cornell-Tech and clinicians and researchers at WCM to address medicine's toughest problems.
Talk: Using AI to better understand the human brain
Abstract: The human brain contains ~86 billion neurons having ~100 trillion connections and is arguably the most complex object in the known universe. It is capable of complex thought and emotion, rapid learning, and predicting the future. The convergence of the availability of big brain data and advances in AI have poised us to begin unraveling the mysteries of this elusive object. This talk will cover topics like brain-behavior mapping and the intersection of human and computer vision. Having a better understanding of how the brain works will allow us to better diagnose, prognoses and treat brain based disease/disorders.