2020 AAAI US$1M Annual Award for Societal Impact of Artificial Intelligence goes to MIT’s CSAIL Professor, Regina Barzilay
UPDATED on 3/14/2021
AI reduces variability in breast density reporting
By Erik L. Ridley, AuntMinnie staff writer

WordCloud Image Produced by Adam Tubman
“The model learns to make subjective assessments without the bias of human labeling for training, but with some guidance and therefore not completely unsupervised learning,” she said.
The software was assessed in a reader study using a set of 792 screening mammograms that included many challenging borderline samples and came from three institutions, two continents, and three vendors, according to Watanabe. The seven radiologists in the reader study had spent at least 75% of their time reading mammograms for the last three years and read more than 5,000 mammograms each year.
The readers had significant inter-reader variability in their density assessments, producing a kappa of 0.35 for the specific BI-RADS A-D category assessments, as well as a kappa of 0.6 in the less-challenging binary classification of dense versus nondense breast tissue, according to Watanabe.
The AI software also demonstrated a level of agreement with the reader results that correlated with the degree of reader consensus.
“In cases where there was 100% reader agreement, cmDensity was near perfect and was perfect for four-class and two-class assessments, respectively, with kappas of 0.97 and 1.0,” she said.
The few outlier assessments for the specific BI-RADS categories were off by just one BI-RADS class, Watanabe said.
The software was also superior in terms of intra-reader variability, yielding an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.99, compared with an ICC range of 0.70 to 0.82 for the radiologists, according to the researchers.
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Barzilay’s work in AI, which ranges from tools for early cancer detection to platforms to identify new antibiotics, is increasingly garnering recognition: On Wednesday, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence named Barzilay as the inaugural recipient of a new annual award honoring an individual developing or promoting AI for the good of society. The award comes with a $1 million prize sponsored by the Chinese education technology company Squirrel AI Learning.
Barzilay’s treatment was successful, and she believes her clinical team at MGH did the best they could in providing her with standard care. At the same time, she said, “it was extremely not satisfying to see how the simplest things that the technology can address were not addressed” — including a delayed diagnosis, an inability to collect data, and statistical flaws in studies used to make treatment decisions.
AAAI and Squirrel AI Learning Announce the Establishment of US$1M Annual Award for Societal Impact of Artificial Intelligence
May 28, 2019
Beijing, ChinaThe Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Squirrel AI Learning announced the establishment of a new $1M annual award for societal benefits of AI. The award will be sponsored by Squirrel AI Learning as part of its mission to promote the use of artificial intelligence with lasting positive effects for society.
The new Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence to Benefit Humanity was announced jointly by Derek Haoyang Li, Founder and Chairman of Squirrel AI Learning, and Yolanda Gil, President of AAAI, at the 2019 conference for AI for adaptive Education (AIAED) in Beijing.
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