Harvard Global Symposium on AI in Dentistry
Last week, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM) hosted its inaugural Global Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Dentistry. The two-day event at Harvard’s new Science and Engineering Complex was completely sold out and featured lectures by high-level speakers from both industry and academia around the world, along with several exciting workshops and an engaging research poster session.
On Day 1, our team of Harvard Medical School and HSDM researchers hosted a workshop titled “Computer Vision for Predicting Periodontal Stability from Dental Radiographs.” During this workshop, we discussed the challenges of diagnosing periodontitis, predicting disease onset, and progression. We also explored how AI, specifically applied computer vision, can help address some of these challenges. More details will be shared as we prepare our publication.
HSDM workshop team (from left to right): Sang J. Lee, Maria Di Martino, Andreas Werdich, Chia-Yu (Jennifer) Chen, Balazs Feher, Jane R. Barrow, Magda Feres.
Fernanda Viégas’ keynote presentation provided a comprehensive overview of the human-AI interface, offering unique insights from Google’s People + AI Research Initiative. The day concluded with a poster session, where we showcased our ongoing research on predicting post-traumatic neuropathy after wisdom tooth extraction.
Day 2 began with Dimitris Bertsimas’ keynote presentation on how AI will shape the future of universities. His lecture emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and highlighted some of the limitations of the current academic model. To address major global challenges, such as climate change, it was suggested that dedicated units focusing on specific problems might be more effective than traditional university departments organized by discipline.
Following the keynote presentation, a series of interesting lectures took place. One notable highlight was Falk Schwendicke, the principal investigator of the Dental Topic Group within the WHO-ITU-WIPO Global Initiative on AI for Health. He discussed data modalities used for AI research in dentistry and the primary limitations associated with them.
The first HSDM Global Symposium on AI in Dentistry has been a resounding success by all measures, reflecting the increasing focus on AI in dental medicine across Harvard, academia, and industry.