By Maneesh Juneja
I appreciate that in the modern era, algorithms are closely guarded secrets by companies just like Kentucky Fried Chicken guards its secret recipe. I’m not saying that private corporations should make their algorithms open source and lose their competitive advantage, but maybe we need an independent body that can be monitoring these algorithms in healthcare, not just once when the product is approved, but all year round, so that we can feel protected? 
I found a fascinating post by Jason Bloomberg, who in response to the VW emissions scandal, asks if this is the death knell for the Internet of Things?
Bloomberg cites ‘calibration attacks’ as the possible cause of the VW scandal, and goes on to highlight how this may impact healthcare too. In my opinion, each of the three conferences I attended should have had a session where we could have a healthy debate about algorithms. I keep hearing about how artificial intelligence, big data and algorithms will lead to so many amazing things, but I never hear anyone talking about calibration attacks, and how to prevent them. Zara Rahman closes her wonderful post on understanding algorithms with, “Though we can’t monitor the steps of the process that humans decide upon to create an algorithm, we can – or should be able to – monitor and have oversight on the data that is provided as input for those algorithms.”
Read the entire article at http://maneeshjuneja.com/blog/2015/15/promise-doesnt-equal-proof.
