How can I contribute to cancer research as a computer engineering student if I have basic knowledge of artificial intelligence?

Neither I have intensive knowledge of Artificial Intelligence, nor am I related to the medical field. However, there’s a lot I have learned over the years researching on technology and healthcare. According to Chaad Steelberg, CEO of Veritone (a company that has created OS for AI), we’re just under a decade away from the cure of cancer.

Indeed, technology has helped heaps in treating what once was an incurable disease. However, researches are still undergoing as to how can we employ AI to treat cancer. The simplest form of the idea here is to create a machine and feed in it enough data so that it understands things on itself and make the best possible judgments. Now how do we feed data in this machine is a challenge—because there’s a dearth of it. And even when they are there, extracting the important data and understanding it is difficult. Also, given it concerns healthcare, programming an algorithm that self-learns, evolve and make error-free judgments isn’t really that easy.

There are many ways Artificial Intelligence can be used in the cure of cancer. For the starters, we can first use it to spot very early signs of this deadly disease. Second, once a tumor has grown in size, we can use AI to effectively track its growth to establish timely and personalized treatments. Third, even when we’ve been successfully treating cancer for a few years now, the entire process is highly inconvenient and inefficient. We can use AI to further understand the development of cancer and then find out much better treatments to fight it off.

Now coming to your exact question, how can a computer engineering student with basic knowledge of Artificial Intelligence help in cancer research? Frankly, you need more than just a basic knowledge of AI. Programming your regular software is much different to developing an AI-powered program. You need to understand all the various disciplines associated with AI. Then, following, you must also have a decent knowledge of data analytics. With an intensive knowledge of all the discipline and proper idea of the thing that you want to create (again, there are many ways AI can be used in the cure of cancer), you then start writing codes and providing inputs (data) in it.

Of course, the answer is rather generic. But understand this—before developing a program, you first need to understand what problem you want to solve. Know this and the rest will follow.

Having been a simple practicing doc, not into any research, not into CS either, am not sure if I can comment.