Events

In 1989, Sue Boyd was one of only four female Australian ambassadors in the world. She is a vital figure and advocate who paved the way to the current 43% female representation in Australian Heads of Mission today. She shares her experiences and story in her memoir Not Always Diplomatic: An Australian Woman’s Journey Through International Affairs.

• Have women shattered the glass ceiling in diplomacy, and broken the barriers to fruitful careers in foreign service, or is politics in Australia still an old boys club?
• What are the pitfalls both men and women should look out for if they had ambitions to work in public service and foreign policy?
• What career strategies should women employ, and what work still needs to be done to achieve gender equality post-COVID 19?

This in-conversation style talk, facilitated by Professor Michael Wesley, Deputy Vice Chancellor of The University of Melbourne, will unpack the challenges faced by women in international diplomacy and public service. This event will discuss:

• Sue Boyd’s memoir and reflections of her time in Asia and beyond
• The challenges that women in leadership roles face in international diplomacy
• Trends in female participation, and how to increase women’s roles in government

Though the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare warrants genuine enthusiasm, meaningful impact will require careful integration into clinical care. AI tools are susceptible to mistakes and rarely capable of capturing all of the nuances pertaining to a complex clinical situation. Thus, we propose approaches designed to augment, rather than replace, clinicians during clinical decision making.

In this talk, Associate Professor Jenna Wiens will highlight three related research directions pertaining to:
i) a transfer learning approach for mitigating potentially harmful shortcuts when making diagnoses
ii) a simple yet accurate deterioration index that generalizes across hospitals and
iii) lessons learned during deployment of a risk stratification tool for predicting healthcare-associated infections.

In summary, there’s a critical need for machine learning in healthcare; however, the safe and meaningful adoption of these techniques will require collaboration between clinicians and AI.