A Passionate Pursuit: Combining Computer Science and Health
Early Influences
Growing up in Texas and New Mexico in an engineering-oriented Iranian-American family, Marzyeh Ghassemi had role models to follow into a STEM career. While she loved puzzle-based video games, her mother also engaged her in more advanced math early on, enticing her toward seeing math as more than arithmetic.
The Convergence of Interests
As Ghassemi earned her undergraduate degree at New Mexico State University, she became fascinated with health care. However, the pull of computer science and engineering was stronger. When she found that computer science, broadly, and AI/ML, specifically, could be applied to health care, it was a convergence of interests.
The Pursuit of a Career
Today, Ghassemi and her Healthy ML research group at LIDS work on the deep study of how machine learning (ML) can be made more robust and applied to improve safety and equity in health.
A Breakthrough
Her favorite breakthrough in the work she has done came about in several parts. First, she and her research group showed that learning models could recognize a patient’s race from medical images like chest X-rays, which radiologists are unable to do. The group then found that models optimized to perform well "on average" did not perform as well for women and minorities. This past summer, her group combined these findings to show that the more a model learned to predict a patient’s race or gender from a medical image, the worse its performance gap would be for subgroups in those demographics.
The Importance of Accountability
Ghassemi’s work is informed by her identity. "I am a visibly Muslim woman and a mother — both have helped to shape how I see the world, which informs my research interests," she says. "I work on the robustness of machine learning models, and how a lack of robustness can combine with existing biases. That interest is not a coincidence."
Conclusion
As passionate as Ghassemi is about her work, she intentionally keeps track of life’s bigger picture. "When you love your research, it can be hard to stop that from becoming your identity — it’s something that I think a lot of academics have to be aware of," she says. "I try to make sure that I have interests (and knowledge) beyond my own technical expertise. One of the best ways to help prioritize a balance is with good people. If you have family, friends, or colleagues who encourage you to be a full person, hold on to them!"
A Faith in Seeing Life as a Journey
Ghassemi professes a faith in seeing life as a journey. "There’s a quote by the Persian poet Rumi that is translated as, ‘You are what you are looking for,’" she says. "At every stage of your life, you have to reinvest in finding who you are, and nudging that towards who you want to be."
