Ask the Expert: AI and Machine Learning In Biology

Q: Dan, could you introduce us to the work you do?

Cambrio helps teams build machine learning features that go into software for automating workflows that expert humans are doing in their tasks. Sometimes it is rapid prototyping, other times the problem justifies a more strategic approach. For scientific workflows, you’ve got some complicated data, maybe multiple sources of complicated data and you’re trying to figure out how to centralize those data and use them to make predictions in a very contextually sensitive, domain aware way, such that the scientist who’s going to use this actually embraces it and it helps them solve their problems. We’re a small team, we do this across a variety of domains, but we have a particular focus in pharma, biotech, life sciences in general.

Q: For those who are unfamiliar, how can AI/machine learning accelerate the process of rapidly understanding all of the human data that we have?

“AI” is artificial intelligence, “ML” is machine learning. Artificial intelligence is a highly loaded word, kind of like magic. Once you start to understand it, it’s no longer magic, it’s just engineering. I actually think this is very true in AI and a lot of the things happening today where the underlying “magic” is computation - using computers to do computation more efficiently, more reproducibly, and at a far bigger scale than a human can do them. That’s actually the core mechanism we exploit.