AI researchers have a plan to pay patients for data

He’s working with Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, to create a secure way for patients to share their data with researchers. The priorities I have for valuing my data (say, personal privacy) conflict directly with Facebook’s (fueling ad algorithms).Song thinks that for data ownership to work, the whole system needs a rethink. Patients upload pictures of their medical data—say, an eye scan—and medical researchers like Chang submit the AI systems they need data to train. The technique also draws on Song’s prior research to help ensure that the software can’t be reverse-engineered after the fact to extract the data used to train it.Chang thinks that privacy-conscious design could help deal with medicine’s data silos, which prevent data from being shared across institutions. Their contribution to overall success may be conditioned on who else is playing.In a medical study that uses machine learning, there are lots of reasons why your data might be worth more or less than mine, says Zou. Sometimes it’s the quality of the data—a poor quality eye scan might do a disease-detection algorithm more harm than good. Her team is also looking into ways of estimating the value of particular data before the AI systems are trained, so that users know roughly how much they’ll make by giving researchers access.Wider adoption of the data ownership idea is a ways off, Song admits.