How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare HumanCopyright (c) 2019by Eric Topol The author, an innovative medical school president in California, is one of my favorites on the topic of computing in medicine. He sees the medical landscape wider than most scholars, and he is a true humanist at heart. He surveys the field of artificial intelligence and sees how it could apply to modern medicine. Most of the described projects are pipe dreams now, but…
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book, written by a non-technologist with extensive military experience, describes the intersection of artificial intelligence with United States military affairs. It uses terms like “autonomy” and “semi-autonomy” extensively. Autonomous weapons are weapons that can identify their own targets. Semi-autonomous weapons can track pre-identified targets (that is, targets previously identified by humans). Semi-autonomous weapons are currently…
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov My rating: 0 of 5 stars This book from the 1950s is one of the most respected works of science fiction in the English language. It tells the story of how “robots” (what we’d probably now call computers and artificial intelligence) end up taking over the world. Fortunately, Asimov’s dystopian tale has ended up not becoming true – in the timespans described by the book, at least. Computers are often…
The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan My rating: 0 of 5 stars This book, copyright 1984, is not one’s typical software read. Typical books on software deal with the latest and greatest that’s coming down the pike. Instead, this book is a reminder of what is great in the UNIX operating system. It harkens back to the days when assembly coding was common and programming in C was considered more cutting edge. So…
Machine Learning and AI for Healthcare: Big Data for Improved Health Outcomes by Arjun Panesar My rating: 4 of 5 stars After the first chapter of this book, I was ready to put it down and regret the money I spent on it. It seemed to walk over ground that I’ve already covered as a researcher in medical informatics. Fortunately, I continued, for I came to learn a lot from this author. Although not as…
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma My rating: 0 of 5 stars A classic in the field of computer science, this book describes how object-oriented software can be used to develop meaningful (and reusable) classes. It is written by the so-called “gang of four” affiliated with a working group at the University of Illinois. It has achieved notoriety for its assistance in helping programmers write code more effectively in languages like…
Mastering Deep Learning: A Complete Introduction for Beginners and Newbies by James Gabriel My rating: 0 of 5 stars Deep Learning seeks to mimic how humans learn (i.e., the brain processes of how humans learn in their cerebral cortex) and apply this mimicry to how computer programs are written. Thus, we have terms like a “neural network” which does not refer to a brain (made up of neurons) but to a web of computer cells…
by Michael WalkerCopyright (c) 2018. This book sits in a series by the publishing house AI Sciences that traverses topics in the field of Artificial Intelligence to make these subjects more accessible for the masses. I bought this book’s Kindle Edition for only $5. Interestingly, this was one of the most expensive items in the series. I am glad to have taken this short (77-page) book for a perusal. It reviewed some of my prior…
Introduction to Natural Language Processing: Concepts and Fundamentals for Beginners by Michael Walker Machine Learning and AI for Healthcare: Big Data for Improved Health Outcomes by Arjun Panesar
by Camille FournierCopyright (c) 2017 My path to software was not traditional. I always did well at mathematics in school, but I liked many things that weren’t technical – journalism, religion, poetry, and medicine all pulled my strings at some time. I have ended up producing software used in medical research. As such, I figured that I needed to study the traditional career path in software/technology to try to meld my diverse skill-set with more…