[Note from HIFA coordinator, Neil PW: Our thanks to Hannah Daniel for volunteering as HIFA correspondent for the WHA]
Hi All,
A quote from today’s session I resonated with was “Innovation without access is injustice”. I joined a discussion in the Executive Board Room where Chief Scientist of the WHO, Dr. Sylvie Briand, led discourse on medical disinformation and how to effectively combat it as reliance on AI applications for medical queries rise.
Some suggestions included initiatives for strengthening social listening capability given deficient attention spans in the era of social media and to elevate known thought leaders in the space. The DG of the Red Cross Committee also spoke on crisis management due to misinformation across borders. He also stressed the impediments to knowledge share caused by journals paywalling their research papers, which prevents information sharing that could greatly benefit to other countries.
This led to a discussion on the necessity of a peer review process to cross check information and glaring findings that healthcare workers are now embracing misinformation from probabilistic tools trained on web scraping rather than vetted medical research papers and guidelines.
I also had an interesting discussion with members of the WHO youth engagement team regarding the loneliness epidemic in member states and the deadliness of chronic loneliness. As an American I see this issue persisting through how AI has drastically changed human interaction. They have instantiated “Ministers of Loneliness” in 11 WHO member states and are compiling solutions from WHA and youth delegates in attendance on how to combat this issue.
Best,
Hannah C. Daniel
Cornell '23 | Computer Science
HIFA profile: Hanna Daniel is a software engineer at Google, where she worked on Google AI Studio, a platform for software developers to use Gemini models. Her work is now focused on designing AI data systems at scale. She is passionate about building responsible and safe AI systems. She graduated with a B.S. Computer Science degree from Cornell University. hannahoviya AT gmail.com