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In episode 46 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Luis Voloch.
Luis is co-founder of Immunai, a leading AI-led drug discovery company with over 140 employees and over one billion dollar valuation based out of NYC & Tel Aviv. Before Immunai, Luis was Head of Data Science and Machine Learning at ITC and worked at Palantir, where he worked on a variety of ML efforts. He did his studies and research in Math and CS in MIT.
He has also led AI, genomics, and software efforts at a number of other companies.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(02:25) Luis’s math background and getting into AI
(06:35) Luis’s PhD experience, proving theoretical guarantees for recommendation systems
(09:45) Why Luis left his PhD
(15:45) Why Luis is excited about intersection of ML and biology
(18:28) Challenges of applying AI to biology
(22:55) Immunai
(27:03) Challenges in building a biotech (or “tech-bio”) company
(30:30) Research at Immunai, Neural Design for Genetic Perturbation Experiments
(34:43) Interpretability in ML + biology
(36:00) What Luis plans to do next
(37:55) Luis’s advice for grad students / ML people interested in biology
(40:00) Luis’s perspective on the future of AI + biology
(43:10) Outro
Links:
Luis Voloch: AI and Biology