AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium Plenary Sessions
Opening Keynote Presentation
Sunday, November 12, 2023
Latanya Arvette Sweeney, PhD, FACMI
Latanya Sweeney pioneered the field known as data privacy, launched the emerging area known as algorithmic fairness, and her work is explicitly cited in government regulations worldwide, including the U.S. federal medical privacy regulation known as HIPAA.
Dr. Sweeney is the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government where she explores how technology can be used to assess and solve societal, political and governance problems. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Technology Science, the Faculty Chair of the Tech Science Program in Government, and the Director of the Public Interest Tech Lab at Harvard.
Dr. Sweeney was formerly the Chief Technology Officer, also called the Chief Technologist, at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). After concluding her tenure at the FDA, she moved to Currier House at Harvard College, as the X.D. and Nancy Yang Faculty Deans of Currier House. Dr. Sweeney considers being Faculty Dean one of the most rewarding experiences of her life.
Dr. Sweeney is a recipient of the prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Privacy Award, the American Psychiatric Association's Privacy Advocacy Award, and has testified before government bodies worldwide. She earned her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2001; the first Black woman to do so. In 2006, Latanya Sweeney was elected to Fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics and received a distinguished paper award from AMIA in 1996.
Closing Keynote Presentation
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Ziad Obermeyer, MD
Ziad Obermeyer is Associate Professor and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley, where he works at the intersection of machine learning and health. He is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and was named an Emerging Leader by the National Academy of Medicine. His papers appear in a wide range of journals (ICML, JAMA, Nature Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Science), and win awards from professional societies in medicine and economics.
Dr. Obermeyer’s work on algorithmic bias is frequently cited in the public debate about artificial intelligence, and in federal and state regulatory guidance and investigations. He is a co-founder of Nightingale Open Science, a non-profit that makes massive new medical imaging datasets available for research, and Dandelion Health, a data platform for AI innovation. Previously, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Co., and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. He continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved communities.