As industries explore how to leverage artificial intelligence, researchers from across the state gathered at the University of North Texas for the AI for Biology and Medicine research symposium. The inaugural symposium was hosted by the Center for Computational Life Science.

“Our goal is to bring together AI scientists and biologists to spark new connections and collaborations,” says center director and associate professor of computer science and engineering Serdar Bozdag.

Interim College of Science Dean Ed Dzialowski welcomed the group and said he was looking forward to the day becoming a platform of inspiration, collaboration and exchange of ideas.

The day featured 16 presentations across four sessions plus a longer keynote address by associate professor Iman Hajirasouliha from Will Cornell Medicine of Cornell University. His address, Artificial Intelligence and Foundation Models for Reproductive Medicine: From Embryo to Ovary, shared the different types of AI models Hajirasouliha created to answer questions in reproductive care, such as IVF success rates and detect embryos with an abnormal number of chromosomes.

“AI will impact reproductive medicine. It’s up to us to make it user-friendly and expand its real-world uses,” Hajirasouliha says.

The rest of the day’s presentations were given by students and guests from UNT, UNT Health, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, University of Texas at Arlington, Southern Methodist University and AI-driven pharmaceutical company Lantern Pharma. Topics varied from detecting dementia to predicting patients’ response to chemotherapy and drug-use discovery. Many ended by sharing that they were open to collaboration.

“If you want a drug discovery challenge, then I am here to recruit you,” says David Siderovski, professor of pharmacology and neuroscience at UNT Health, who presented on g-proteins in the human body. “Let’s work together and collaborate on medical science’s mysteries.”

The presentations were also broken up with poster sessions. More than 40 students from UNT and the visiting universities presented their research across a range of topics, such as using AI to tackle medical questions, training AI for things such as predicting cardiovascular disease risk factors, using AI to boost medical records cybersecurity or how to account for bias in AI models.

“We’re seeing this performance gap — a gender bias — in some of these models,” says UNT graduate student Poulomi Guha, who’s pursuing a master’s in AI. “We’ve already seen a disparity in how early diseases are detected in men versus women, so it’s important we make sure AI doesn’t follow that same path.”

By the end of the symposium, students and professors were seen exchanging contact information with one another, and plans are underway for next year’s symposium.

“I really want to say thanks to everyone who came to the symposium and our volunteers,” Bozdag says. “The rooms were fully engaged today, and I hope everyone made new contacts that lead to new collaborations on bigger and better research projects.”