LLMs and Healthcare Applications: Where Things Are & Lessons from Building Conversational Applications at Scale

Welcome back to the Autonomous Health podcast. AI conversational agents and natural language have existed well before the recent advances in large-language-models (LLMs).

In this episode, we talk to John O’Donovan, PhD. John is a machine learning and AI innovator who serves as a research scientist at UC Santa Barbara and has authored 100+ scientific publications. He also leads AI teams at Teladoc Health. John has been working on conversational agents for the last several years, and has built and scaled large conversational systems that serve millions of consumers prior to the most recent LLM revolution.

John and I talk about his personal journey and the role of language in healthcare conversations. We discuss some of the differences between operational-use cases in healthcare vs. the path to clinical triage and care delivery. We dig into reasonable use-cases today, and the modeling approaches that could lead us to AI-driven clinical decisions. Then we end this episode with competing predictions on the timeline that lead to true AI-driven care. 

About Our Guest:
John O’Donovan leads an AI team at Teladoc Health, working on innovative chat and computer vision applications for telehealth. He also holds an appointment in the Computer Science department at UCSB as an Associate Researcher, where he previously lectured in CS and co-directed the Four Eyes research lab for many years. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 2008 with a focus on Trust in Recommender systems, and has published over 100 peer reviewed papers in the area of AI and HCI. He also recently served as program chair of ACM's RecSys and IUI conferences.

Mentioned In This Episode:

• John O'Donovan UCSB page:  https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~jod/

#autonomoushealth #tech #ai #machinelearning #healthcare

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Autonomous Health is...
Produced & Hosted by: Anmol Madan
Edited by: Losa Amara Meru
Marketing: Erin Garcia Miller

About Your Host:
Anmol Madan is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and executive who has been leading the digital health and AI revolution over the past two decades. Anmol has co-founded or held executive roles at multiple unicorns in the emerging field of digital healthcare; a field which has existed for less than two decades. His professional contributions in the field have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from leading VCs, and been featured in such media as CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wired Magazine. His scientific contributions have been published in dozens of scientific articles in leading computer science and digital health journals, and led to over 30 issued and pending US patents.
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