3 Examples of How Biology Helps Me Make Stronger AI

How I’m turning bio classes into computational unlocks

From Pixabay

Are you in a rush? Here’s the key takeaway:

AI is a lot like writing. Great on its own, but kind of bland.

It’s 10x better when you use your personal experience and years of knowledge to add flavour and depth.

Attacking AI with my bio knowledge has been an unlock.

But wait (record scratch), here’s some context. I:

• am a 3rd-year Biotech/Economics student at UWaterloo, doing research at The Hospital for Sick Children.
• have never been formally trained in CS, AI/ML, etc — entirely self-taught.
• am working on an ML model that predicts the structural effects of missense mutation on protein-protein interactions, with an interest in ASD.

This post is for people like me: in biology and computation, wondering if their molecular know-how even matters in a post-AI world.

I know the answer:

It absolutely does.

Understanding protein biology enabled me to:

1. Select the proper techniques for balancing my training data
2. Filter and prioritize my data to meet…