“Healthcare produces a lot of data, and many doctors are interested in using AI to solve medical problems. I can help them do that.”- Dr. Arya RahgozarWhen doctors explain a problem they’re facing to Dr. Arya Rahgozar, he often thinks “I have just the tool for this in my toolbox.” For over 20 years he’s been using his data science toolbox to solve problems in banking, marketing, supply chains and healthcare. 

One of his specialties is natural language processing, which lets computers “understand” language similar to the way that people do. It’s what makes search engines, chat bots and virtual assistants work. However, when AI tools provide predictions or answers, it's hard to know why they chose to give a particular answer. People usually want to know the "why" behind an answer, so we need to be able to explain how AI tools are arriving at their answers. 

This area of AI research is known as explainability. It’s a particular passion of Dr. Rahgozar’s, along with automatic semantic classification, which assigns text into predefined categories. Being able to explain how an AI tool arrives at an answer is particularly important in healthcare applications which could impact patient care.  

“Healthcare produces a lot of data, and many doctors are interested in using AI to solve medical problems. I can help them do that.”

Dr. Rahgozar was recently appointed as a scientist in the Clinical Epidemiology Program at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and will be working with the Ottawa Methods Centre. He is also an adjunct professor of Data Science at the University of Ottawa.

The Ottawa Hospital is a leading academic health, research and learning hospital proudly affiliated with the University of Ottawa and supported by The Ottawa Hospital Foundation.