Award: Jiani Zheng, co-founder and CPO of Butlr wins 2025 McKnight’s Women of Distinction award in the Commercial Excellence category

The technology designed by Zeng has been key in improving senior living and care operations, helping staff members effectively monitor residents through motion detection, enabling them to respond quickly to acute health risks without compromising resident privacy.Forster Stubbs, McKnight Senior Living The work of Jiani Zeng, a Chinese designer, researcher, and co-founder and chief product officer of Butlr Technologies, often takes place in the background, but the results always end up at the forefront. Thanks in part to her efforts, Butlr is the first company to fuse artificial intelligence and body heat sensing technology to provide insights into how humans use indoor space for living and working while ensuring anonymity. This technology has significant applications in the senior living and care sector and helped earn Zeng a 2025 McKnight’s Women of Distinction award in the Commercial Excellence…

Continue ReadingAward: Jiani Zheng, co-founder and CPO of Butlr wins 2025 McKnight’s Women of Distinction award in the Commercial Excellence category

2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Griffin Weber, MD, PhD — Connecting Health Organizations with Federated Research Networks

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The integration and analysis of electronic health record (EHR) data across institutions present both significant challenges and transformative opportunities for biomedical research. This talk outlines the development and application of federated data networks such as I2B2 and SHRINE, which enable real-time, privacy-preserving queries across distributed EHR systems. These platforms support large-scale cohort discovery and have been instrumental in initiatives like the EnACT network and the COVID-19-focused 4CE consortium. In contrast, centralized repositories like the NIH’s N3C and Epic’s Cosmos database offer comprehensive datasets conducive to machine learning but may obscure site-specific variability. 

Continue Reading2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Griffin Weber, MD, PhD — Connecting Health Organizations with Federated Research Networks

2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Jordan Smoller, MD — An Introduction to the All of Us Research Program

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The All of Us Research Program, a flagship initiative of the NIH, aims to build one of the most comprehensive and diverse biomedical data resources in the world by enrolling over one million participants across the United States. Dr. Jordan Smoller, a lead investigator in the program, outlines its structure, scope, and transformative potential for advancing precision medicine. With over 850,000 participants enrolled and more than 630,000 contributing data, the program integrates electronic health records (EHRs), genomic data, physical measurements, surveys, and wearable device data. 

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

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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.

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2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Conor Walsh, PhD — ML/AI in Soft Wearable Robots

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Advances in soft wearable robotics and machine learning are enabling new approaches to assist and assess human movement, particularly for aging populations and individuals with neurological impairments. Dr. Conor Walsh and his team at the Harvard Biodesign Lab have developed a suite of soft robotic systems designed to support mobility, rehabilitation, and functional independence in real-world settings. 

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2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Michael Kahana, PhD — AI-Guided Closed-Loop Stimulation to Enhance Memory

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Memory performance exhibits substantial moment-to-moment variability, much of which cannot be explained by external factors alone. Dr. Michael Kahana’s research explores the neural underpinnings of this variability and leverages machine learning and intracranial brain recordings to develop targeted interventions for memory enhancement. Through the DARPA-funded Restoring Active Memory (RAM) project, Kahana’s team collected the largest open-access dataset of human intracranial recordings during memory tasks, enabling the development of predictive models that decode memory states in real time.

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2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Martin Sliwinski, PhD — Cognition-on-th-Go: Mobile Tools for Cognition Monitoring and Dementia Prevention

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Early detection of cognitive decline is critical for effective intervention in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Traditional neuropsychological assessments, while useful for diagnosing impairment, are limited in their ability to detect subtle, preclinical changes. Dr. Martin Sliwinski and colleagues propose a novel approach using ultra-brief, mobile cognitive assessments embedded in daily life through ecological momentary assessment (EMA). This method captures high-frequency, real-world data on cognitive performance, enabling the detection of short-term variability and long-term trends. By integrating these assessments with contextual data (e.g., stress, social engagement, physical activity), researchers can model dynamic cognitive processes and identify early signs of decline.

Continue Reading2025 a2 National Symposium Plenary Talk: Martin Sliwinski, PhD — Cognition-on-th-Go: Mobile Tools for Cognition Monitoring and Dementia Prevention