Vibe Research and the Future of Science - On Tech Ethics

Discusses vibe research or science, which is an emerging approach to scientific research using AI. Our guests today are from MIT Critical Data, which develops local AI capacity in healthcare by building open data and software, fostering community engagement through datathons, and advocating for AI equity in research. Sebastian Cajas Senior is an AI scientist at CeADAR with expertise in generative AI, quantum machine learning, and responsible AI. Sebastian is a former fellow in computer science at Harvard University, leading projects in multimodal AI, AI safety, and federated learning. Sebastian is passionate about applying AI to healthcare, education, and high-impact societal challenges. Leo Anthony Celi is the principal investigator behind the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) and its family of databases. With close to 100k users worldwide, an open codebase, and close to 10k publications in Google Scholar, the datasets have shaped the course of machine learning in healthcare. Meskerem Kebede is a research officer at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Meskerem has previously worked as a clinician and lecturer at the ENT surgery department at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. She is passionate about strengthening surgical systems in low- and middle-income countries and has a special interest in health workforce development in East Africa. Hyunjung Gloria Kwak is an assistant professor at Emory University’s School of Nursing, with a PhD in Computer Science. She researches bias-aware modeling, social determinants of health, and simulation-based studies, integrating large-scale EHRs and multimodal data to improve decision-making, and leads interdisciplinary projects on predictive analytics, representation, and real-world AI evaluation in healthcare.  Additional resources: MIT Critical Data: https://criticaldata.mit.edu/ CITI Program’s course catalog: https://about.citiprogram.org/course-catalog