The Zen of Artificial Intelligence and Beer League Hockey

I woke up yesterday morning with a knee that had ballooned to the size of a California grapefruit. I don’t have a great story to tell. I didn’t dangle a puck around a defender and leave it bar down in the back of the net, nor did I leap over Shaq to flush a jam and hang ceremoniously from the rim.  As the doctor in the ER, put it so eloquently, in terms spoken to his young budding resident, “Where’s the guy with the shitty knees”.

I limped over, aided by crutches to the monitor to witness sixty years of a lot of wear and tear and remnants of five operations. What I saw wasn’t a total surprise, but more of a reminder than anything that mobility wasn’t going to get any better soon without some intervention and weight loss.

My experience is a testament to the Canadian medical system, that works well when it needs to work. From check in to blood work, urine analysis, x-rays and two consults with a medical team, 4 hours. Priceless. I mean priceless, as in it didn’t cost a cent, with exception of parking. Ah the advantages of living in a socialist, near communist country.

It’s not to say that any countries medical systems are pure perfection. We all have limitations, but most people in the world place healthcare as the number one, top of the list needs.

I’ve been in the world of innovation all my life.  I view most situations, even the hospital visit, through the lens of wanting to make things better. After all, isn’t change for the better really at the heart of all entrepreneurs and innovators?  

I was watching Fareed Zakia this morning (for me the most intelligent viewing CNN has to offer), where he interviewed Bill Gates and Stanford Professor Daphne Koller. Professor Koller talked about the possibilities of the application of AI in the medical field, especially as it relates to interpretation of test results and its’ ability for more pin point accuracy.  I’m old enough (see above) to have witnessed the incremental advances of technology over several decades.  Gates made the mention that it would be better to be born twenty years from now, given the advancement of technologies.  From the medical side, who wouldn’t agree with that statement.  

Artificial Intelligence is the great wunderkind of today.  I get it. It’s cool and hip and offers the promise of a brighter tomorrow. At the heart of all of these types of ‘new & hip’ technologies that sweep the world, they seemed to have their genesis in evolution rather than revolution.

My personal example was when I formed a team of entrepreneurs in Ottawa, Canada that went to solve taking static microfilm images of historical newspapers and allowing them to be searchable on the internet.  It was the year 2000, bandwidth penetration was low in North America and the cost of storage was very high. We had mastered the ability to take sharp images of these newspapers pages at speed, strip the words and create vector points to high light results from OCR.  Great, we had a product and no way to deliver one meg images in a 14K modem world. We were all in on Moore’s’ Law and as it happens, it paid off as bandwidth penetration sky rocketed while the price of mass storage dropped. Our storage array cost 600K for 10 terabytes which rivalled any mass storage array in 2000. That same storage now can be easily squeezed into a thumb drive.

So here we were with a technology that worked and could process records in a scalable way. Oh yeah, who are we going to sell this to? Customers? Anyone? Early adopters were newspaper chains, who liked what we had created enough to invest in our world.  We won our first contract with AMI. Yes, the AMI of David Pecker and the National Inquirer to take their tabloid history from 1974 to present day. Our champion and AMI contact was based in Florida, a gentleman named Bob Stevens, a long-time tabloid photojournalist. Days after the attack on the World Trade Towers in New York, Bob received an envelope through the mail, filled with anthrax and quickly became ill and passed away. The Florida plant was irradiated and leveled.  It was a very sad ending to our first contract.

One of our early missions and vision statements went beyond the simple technology.   As we envisioned, ‘Imagine a product that would represent the record of daily life for the past 500 years, country by country, language by language’. It was what newspapers represented to society and powerfully thought provoking.

We then sought partners who would be aligned with that vision. Our first choice was to keep this tech in Canada and worked with our Nation Library of Canada, to seek kindred spirits.  That quickly became an exercise in futility and was a total disappointment for us. Next up, Google. After 2 years and meeting with 36 Google folks, including Susan Wojcicki who now heads YouTube, we sold to Google as our second choice. Our vision to create this incredible education, genealogical resource has yet to be fulfilled by Google. Come on Susan, make it happen!

But I digress.  Post our sale to Google, I was interested in giving back to startups and devoted much of my time over 13 years, working with over 300 of these little sprouts to help mentor and raise capital for them.  Some of which were in the medical field.

Our team at the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, mentored a Dr. Andrew Seeley, a Thoracic Surgeon at the Ottawa Hospital system and the founder of Therapeutic Monitoring Systems.  It was an early Artificial Intelligence application centred around the output from respirology monitoring equipment. In its day it was referred to as a ‘decision support’ application and at its heart was an analysis of data that would better arm a physician with data that would help support in the ‘extubating’ & ‘intubation’ of a breathing tube.  In short, there was statistical evidence showing that removing a breathing tube at the ‘right’ time would increase the positive outcome of patients in ICU treatment. It was an incredibly long haul for Dr. Seeley to navigate the Food & Drug Administration, but his perseverance and dedication created a very important tool to assist physicians everywhere.

Fast forward 10 years and think in terms of the data now available through the interconnection of devices and the move toward digitization of medical processes including x-ray, ultrasound and sensors used in the assessment process.  It’s illustrative of what Bill Gates stated about being born twenty years in the future.  The ubiquitous availability of data, improving interconnectivity of devices and sensors will be the great enablers of AI as Professor Koller predicts.

Now could someone please tell me how AI will get me back on my skates for beer league hockey!