8 Sep | Trust Me, I'm an Algorithm: Health's Blind Spots

Healthcare is built on uncertainty. Every diagnosis, prognosis and treatment decision relies on incomplete information and imperfect judgement. AI promises something medicine has long sought: greater precision, consistency and confidence.

But this isn't a debate about whether algorithms can outperform clinicians. It's about how clinicians and data scientists recognise, communicate and manage uncertainty, and the blind spots each brings.

Clinicians make decisions under pressure, balancing evidence, experience, context and patient values. Yet medicine has its own forms of overconfidence, and not every clinician is trained to acknowledge uncertainty, quantify risk or use data to improve performance.

Data scientists have rigorous methods for measuring confidence, calibration, error rates, bias and drift. But AI is often presented as objective and precise, even when it's shaped by messy data, hidden assumptions and changing clinical environments.

So who is more honest about uncertainty: the clinician at the bedside or the data scientist behind the model? More importantly, how can clinicians, data scientists, researchers and industry leaders work together in a field where uncertainty isn't a flaw, it's the reality?

Join clinicians, data scientists, researchers and industry leaders as they explore where medicine and AI succeed, where they fall short, and what it will take to make better decisions together in a healthcare system where uncertainty is the only certainty.

Speakers

• Professor Harriet Hiscock
  Impact Domain Academic Lead, Transforming Healthcare, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, the University of Melbourne
• Professor Uwe Aickelin
  Head of School, School of Computing and Information Systems, the University of Melbourne
• Professor Peter Steel
  Director, Centre for Digital Transformation of Health; Associate Dean of Digital Health & Informatics, the University of Melbourne; Chief Transformation Officer, The Royal Melbourne Hospital
• Associate Professor Mark Putland
  Director of Emergency Medicine, The Royal Melbourne Hospital
• Smey (Smith) Pit
  Lead AI Engineer and PhD Researcher