On Monday, Nov 30th, the College of Engineering hosted KFMC’s Dr. Sufana Almashhadi for a seminar titled, “Managing the Human-Side of Technological Innovation” as part of the AI Seminar Series. The seminar started with opening remarks, presented by the Dean of the College of Engineering, Dr. Muhammad Anan, welcoming the guest speaker and attendees to the College’s AI seminar series.
Dr. Sufana is the Director of the Innovation Center at King Fahad Medical City, and a Senior Clinical Research Scientist at the National Neuroscience Institute (NNI). Prior to this leadership position, Sufana was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and is now an affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
The seminar highlighted applications, opportunities, and transformative potential of AI in health care contexts. Dr. Sufana presented an overview of how AI-powered solutions can transform healthcare, with opportunities including disease diagnosis and monitoring, clinical workflow augmentation, and hospital optimization. Following that, the speaker shared insights from applying an AI decision framework at the King Fahad Medical City (KFMC) innovation center, developed to aid technologists and healthcare professionals understand the considerations associated with implementing AI in healthcare. She also highlighted. the importance of AI governance and strategies for aligning AI and machine learning with human capacity.
Dr. Sufana described how AI, including machine learning, presents exciting opportunities to transform the health and life sciences spaces. Case studies at KFMC’s Innovation center showcased how AI offers faster, more accurate clinical decision making and amplified R&D capabilities. Open issues around AI regulation and clinical relevance were discussed, which often impact technology developers and potential investors and cause them to grapple with how to overcome today’s barriers to adoption, compliance, and implementation. In the seminar, Dr. Sufana showcased a framework of human centricity which has proven to be effective in minimizing resistance to change and accelerating innovation AI-driven systems.
The event was attended by students and faculty in both the College of Engineering and College of Medicine, on campus and remotely via zoom. The event concluded with thanking the speaker, participants, and the organizing committee for their participation and an open discussion with the speaker.
