CELEHS 2021 Year-End Update

During the COVID pandemic, the HMS-HSPH Translational Data Science Center for a Learning Healthcare System (CELEHS), led by Director Tianxi Cai, has been busy contributing to international scientific efforts to develop a better understanding of the COVID-19 clinical course. The CELEHS center has been leading analytical efforts for the 4CE COVID-19 international consortium consisting of over 300 hospitals across six countries.

CELEHS has also been actively involved with the new NIH AIM-AHEAD initiative of advancing health equity and researcher diversity. Drs. Tianxi Cai and Junwei Lu will be working closely with colleagues from DBMI at HMS as well as other AIM-AHEAD core teams to provide tools and methods to break the barriers of AI/ML research and address health disparities and inequities for underrepresented communities.

This year the CELEHS Data Science in Action summer program on “Machine Learning for Self-Driving Cars” was extended to two weeks to incorporate a pre-course introduction to the programming language Python. During the second week, the course introduced high school students to programming and data science. Participants learned to program neural networks to recognize images and use them to make their own self-driving toy cars. We hope to continue with this endeavor as we move forward for next year!