Collaborative: Smart Health in the AI and COVID Era

The SCH workshop on “Smart Health in the AI and COVID Era” was held on March 1-2, 2021. The virtual workshop brought together over 120 SCH SCH-funded PIs, 55 aspiring PIs, 15 students as well as several federal attendees from NSF and NIH to discuss the recent advances in the field. The workshop included two plenary talks, three expert panels, six mini-workshops, a government (NSF/NIH) panel, and lightning talks presented by student awardees and 2020 SCH grantees, as well as 60 posters. The workshop provided the opportunity for networking among the researchers with backgrounds in computing, engineering, and healthcare during the pandemic and enabled the PIs to share their experience regarding the challenges they faced during the pandemic to carry out clinical research, and educational and outreach activities.  

The expert panel sessions included the discussion on “Challenges and opportunities of AI in health and biomedical research”, “advanced sensing systems for continuous monitoring, informatics, and closed-loop control”, enhancing human perception, skills, and knowledge” as well as “research during a pandemic”. The mini-workshops covered topics related to “Challenges in next-generation data science”, Smart health enabling technology frontiers”, “Health disparities in Data Science and AI”, “Cognitive and perceptual contributions to interpreting medical images” and “Data infrastructure: the key to the future." The workshop provided the attendees, in particular the aspiring PIs and student awardees, with networking opportunities and an overview of recent advances on AI-assisted healthcare research as well as NIH and NSF funding opportunities in smart health.

The Smart Health in the AI and COVID Era workshop was funded by National Science Foundation Award #2120217.