Long Story Short

Juan M. Lavista Ferres got his start with AI for good in an unlikely way: He really didn’t want to go hiking. While working at Microsoft running randomized control experiments, Ferres had a colleague who was raising money for research on sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, to which he had lost a child. The campaign involved climbing the Kilimanjaro mountain — decidedly a no-go for Ferres. Ferres didn’t want to climb a mountain, but he did want to contribute to his friend’s cause. So rather than lacing up his hiking boots, he got together with a group of colleagues to analyze the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s cohort-linked birth/infant death dataset, an open-source dataset that’s logged tens of thousands of SIDS cases in the United States. Using machine learning models, Ferres and his colleagues were able to manipulate the vast amount of data in ways that had never been done before, revealing new links between risk factors in infants and SIDS. It was through this effort that Ferres re