Abstract:
Many of us use phones and wearables to track our health, but how do these tools actually work—and how much should we trust them? This talk explores how everyday devices use artificial intelligence to estimate health signals, what they do well, where they can mislead us, and why informed curiosity matters more than ever. Using familiar examples like heart-rate measurements and health apps, the talk introduces the idea of AI literacy—the ability to understand, question, and responsibly use AI systems in daily life. Rather than focusing on technical details, we will discuss how data, assumptions, and uncertainty shape the numbers we see on our screens, and why AI can sometimes appear more confident than it should be. The conversation will also connect personal health technologies to broader uses of AI, from chatbots to decision-support systems, highlighting common patterns of promise and limitation. Ultimately, the talk argues that as AI becomes more widespread and invisible, developing basic AI literacy is essential—not to become experts, but to become thoughtful, informed users who know when to trust, when to question, and when to pause.
About the Speaker:
Arvind Rao is a Professor in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Radiation Oncology at the University of Michigan. His group uses image analysis and AI methods to link image-derived phenotypes with genetic data, across biological scale (i.e. single cell, tissue and radiology data). Such methods have found application various areas of biomedical data science. Arvind received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan, specializing in transcriptional genomics, and was a Lane Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in bioimage informatics. He is also a Fellow of American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), The Royal College of Pathology (RCPath) in the UK (by published works) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Supported by Arista Networks India Pvt. Ltd