Regina Barzilay
Distinguished Professor of AI and Health at MIT
An MIT professor who moved from natural language processing to applying deep learning to cancer detection and drug discovery.
Biography
Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist and School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI and Health at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Born in Chișinău, Moldova, she emigrated to Israel at 20, earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 2003, and joined the MIT faculty that year.
Her early work was in natural language processing, including Newsblaster, a system that recognized stories from different sources about the same subject and paraphrased them into a summary. After her breast cancer diagnosis in 2014 she turned to oncology, and with Dr. Connie Lehman and her student Adam Yala developed Mirai, an AI system that predicts the likelihood of breast cancer up to five years in advance from mammograms. She was appointed faculty lead for AI at the MIT Jameel Clinic in 2018, won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and was featured in the FRONTLINE documentary In the Age of AI.
Notable contributions
Developed the Mirai breast cancer risk model
With Connie Lehman and Adam Yala, developed Mirai, a deep learning system that predicts the likelihood of breast cancer up to five years in advance from mammograms and diagnostic notes.
Won a MacArthur Fellowship
Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.
Became faculty lead for AI at the MIT Jameel Clinic
Appointed in 2018 as faculty lead for AI at the new MIT Jameel Clinic for AI health sciences, covering disease detection and drug discovery.
