Regina Barzilay: Deep Learning for Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment | Lex Fridman Podcast #40

The following is a conversation with Regina Barzilay. She's a professor at MIT and a world-class researcher in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology or the use of deep learning for early diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of cancer. She's also been recognized for teaching of several successful AI-related courses at MIT including the popular Introduction to Machine Learning course. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And now here's my conversation with Regina Barzilay. In an interview you've mentioned that if there's one course you would take, it would be a literature course with a friend of yours, uh, that a friend of yours teaches. Just out of curiosity, 'cause I couldn't find anything on it, are there books or ideas that had profound impact on your life journey, books and ideas perhaps outside of computer science and the technical fields?

I think because I'm spending a lot of my time at MIT and previously in other institutions where I was a student, I have limited ability to interact with people so a lot of what I know about the world actually comes from books, uh, and there were quite a number of books that had profound impact on me and how I view the world. Let me just give you, mm, one example of such a book. I've, um, maybe a year ago read a book called The Emperor of All Maladies. It's a book about, um, it's kind of a history of science book on how the treatments and drugs for cancer were developed, and that book, despite the fact that I am in the business of science, really opened my eyes on how imprecise and imperfect the discovery process is, a- and how imperfect our current solutions, uh, and what makes science succeed and be implemented and sometimes it's actually not the strengths of the idea but devotion of the person who wants to see it implemented. So, this is one of the books that, you know, at least for the last year quite changed the way I'm thinking about scientific process just from the historical perspective and what do I need to do to make my ideas really implemented. Let me give you an example of a book which is not a kind of, uh, which is a fiction book, is a book called Americanah and this is a book about a young female student who comes from Africa to study in the United States and it describes her past, uh, you know, within her studies and, uh, her life transformation that, you know, i- in a new country and kind of adaptation to a new culture.

Mm-hmm.

And when I read this book, I saw myself in many different points of it, uh, but- but it also (laughs) kind of gave me the- the lens on different events and some events that I never actually paid attention. One of the funny stories in this book is how she, uh, arrives, uh, to- to her c- new college and she starts speaking in English and she had this beautiful British a- accent because that's how she was educated-