2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Marzyeh Ghassemi, PhD– The Pulse of Ethical Machine Learning in Health

Overview: As machine learning (ML) becomes increasingly integrated into healthcare, ensuring ethical, fair, and robust deployment is critical. Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi and the Healthy ML Lab at MIT investigate the challenges and opportunities of applying ML in clinical settings, with a focus on fairness, privacy, and real-world impact. Through case studies in medical imaging and clinical prediction, her work highlights how models trained on large datasets can exhibit significant disparities in performance across demographic subgroups, including age, race, gender, and insurance status. 

Ghassemi’s research demonstrates that standard ML models often encode demographic attributes—even when not explicitly trained to do so—leading to underdiagnosis and unequal outcomes. While fairness-aware training methods can reduce these disparities, their effectiveness often fails to generalize across institutions. Her team also explores the limitations of vision-language models in healthcare, revealing critical failures in handling negation—a common and essential feature in medical reasoning. 

Beyond algorithmic development, Ghassemi emphasizes the importance of deployment context. Studies show that clinicians, regardless of experience, are highly susceptible to incorrect AI advice, and that the framing of AI outputs (e.g., prescriptive vs. informational) significantly affects decision-making. Personalized uncertainty estimates can help mitigate these risks. 

This work underscores the need for rigorous evaluation, context-aware deployment, and continuous monitoring to ensure that AI systems in healthcare are not only accurate but also equitable and trustworthy. 

Marzyeh Ghassemi, PhD, Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

About the Speaker: Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi is an Associate Professor at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES). She holds MIT affiliations with the Jameel Clinic, LIDS, IDSS, and CSAIL. For examples of short- and long-form talks Professor Ghassemi has given, see her Forbes lightning talk, and her ICML keynote.

Professor Ghassemi holds a Germeshausen Career Development Professorship, and was named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2024, she received an NSF CAREER award, and Google Research Scholar Award. Prior to her PhD in Computer Science at MIT, she received an MSc. degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, and B.S. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering as a Goldwater Scholar at New Mexico State University.

Professor Ghassemi work spans computer science and clinical venues, including NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, MLHC, JAMIA, JMIR, JMLR, AMIA-CRI, Nature Medicine, Nature Translational Psychiatry, and Critical Care. Her work has been featured in popular press such as MIT News, The Boston Globe, and The Huffington Post.