Meet the speakers

Prof. Raphael Sznitman is the director of the ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research and the director of the Center of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at the University of Bern. After receiving a BSc in Cognitive Science from the University of British Columbia (Canada) and a PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University (USA), he was a postdoctoral fellow at the EPFL (Switzerland) and then joined the medical faculty at the University of Bern in 2015. Today, he leads the Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging laboratory, where his research focuses on developing novel approaches in computer vision and machine learning for clinical applications. With over 100 publications to date, keynotes at both technical and clinical international conferences, as well as several research awards in medical imaging and ophthalmology, his work has spanned both fundamental and applied aspects of machine learning, particularly with the translation of machine learning technology in medical products. He has also co-founded two key startups in the domain of AI and ophthalmology (www.retinai.com and www.perivision.io, Switzerland), both of which commercialize AI products for the healthcare sector.

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Janna Hastings obtained her PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge (2019) and holds Masters degrees in both Computer Science (2011) and Philosophy (2012). She is currently Assistant Professor of Medical Knowledge and Decision Support at the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, and Vice-Director of the School of Medicine at the University of St. Gallen. Her research focuses on medical data science for clinical applications and biomedical discovery, with a special focus on how the powerful data-driven approaches to can be made more generalisable and interpretable through the use of prior knowledge.