VTCSOM faculty member co-chairs international conference on artificial intelligence

Nicholas Rider, a faculty member in Health Systems and Implementation Science at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine (VTCSOM), recently co-chaired an international conference in New York City that focused on using computational tools such as artificial intelligence to advance science and improve patient outcomes in clinical immunology.

The 2nd edition of Artificial Intelligence for Primary Immune Disease (AI4PI)  was held in from March 19-22, 2025. AI4PI was co-chaired by Rider (VTCSOM HSIS Faculty, Jacques Riviere (Val De Hebron, Barcelona, ESP), Manish Butte (UCLA) and Vanessa Tenembaum (Jeffrey Modell Foundation, NYC). The conference included more than 130 attendees from 16 countries and over 40 institutions around the world. 

"The second edition of AI4PI brought together a diverse group of computational experts and clinical immunologists to share science and envision a path towards advancing holistic improvements in PI patient outcomes," Rider said. "It's exciting to see this group grow in number and energy.  We already note the formation of strong international collaborations and maturation of local scientific engagements across the Virginia Tech ecosystem." 

Among the speakers, Rider presented information about how learning health systems can leverage AI to improve patient outcomes. Sarah Parker (VTCSOM HSIS Chair) spoke about the importance of human centered design in AI development and deployment , and Dawei Zhou (Virginia Tech computer science and Sanghani Center faculty) presented his team's work on representing complex health care data for rare disease AI-based work. 

Also in attendance were Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health graduate students of the Rider Lab (Jacob Blaukovitch, Roxanna Farzad and Liangying Liu) and Paker Lab (Walter Dickey).  Liu was selected to deliver an oral abstract presentation focused on extracting human immune relevant concepts from the biomedical literature.

A third iteration of the meeting is planned for 2026.