VISE Fall Seminar with James Weimer, PhD, 9.21.23
VISE Fall Seminar with
James Weimer, PhD
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Vanderbilt University
Date: Thursday, September 21, 2023
Time: 11:45 a.m. Lunch, 12:00 p.m. start
Location: Stevenson 5326
Title:
Market-Informed Design for Safe Autonomous Medical Systems
Abstract:
Modern computing systems that interact with patients and clinicians, commonly referred to as medical cyber-physical systems (MCPS), are safety-critical embedded systems that feature tight coupling between communication and computation used to control complex, dynamic, and uncertain physical/physiological plants. Learning-enabled MCPS additionally incorporate components whose behavior is driven by “background knowledge” acquired and updated through a “learning process”. While empirical medical data is often a significant source of this background knowledge, it can also be limited, sparse, or “thin” due to small sample sizes, dataset shifts, anomalies, inter/intra-patient variability, and a limited understanding of the data generation process itself. Consequently, providing safety guarantees and predictable performance for learning-enabled MCPS in the presence of thin data is challenging. In this talk, I will present some of my recent work on techniques and tools for the design and analysis of safe learning-enabled MCPS with thin data. Specifically, in the context of learning enabled medical systems, I will present our work on parameter-invariant monitoring techniques. Real-world applications for in-hospital stroke detection and predicting postpartum hemorrhage will illustrate the utility of my group’s recent work and give light to future research challenges.
Biography:
James (Jim) Weimer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include the design and analysis of cyber-physical systems with application to learning-enabled medical systems, safe autonomy, and cyber-physical security. James holds a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and prior to joining Vanderbilt was faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He serves as an associate editor of the ACM Transaction on Cyber-Physical Systems and ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare. He is a co-founder of two medical device companies: Neuralert and Vasowatch.