Steven Banerjee: How Machine Intelligence, NLP and AI is changing Health Care   [Audio]  Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Steven Banerjee is the CEO of NExTNet Inc. NExTNet is a Silicon Valley based technology startup pioneering natural language based Explainable AI platform to accelerate drug discovery and development. Steven is also the founder of Mekonos, a Silicon Valley based biotechnology company backed by world-class Institutional investors (pre-Series B) — pioneering proprietary cell and gene-engineering platforms to advance personalized medicine. He also advises Lumen Energy, a company that uses a radically simplified approach to deploy commercial solar. Lumen Energy makes it easy for building owners to get clean energy.   Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Episode Links:   Steven Banerjee LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-banerjee/  Steven Banerjee Website: https://www.nextnetinc.com/  Podcast Details:  Podcast website: https://www.humainpodcast.com  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/humain-podcast-artificial-intelligence-data-science/id1452117009  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6tXysq5TzHXvttWtJhmRpS  RSS: https://feeds.redcircle.com/99113f24-2bd1-4332-8cd0-32e0556c8bc9  YouTube Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxvclFvpPvFM9_RxcNg1rag  YouTube Clips: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxvclFvpPvFM9_RxcNg1rag/videos  Support and Social Media:   – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/humain/creators  – Twitter: https://twitter.com/dyakobovitch  – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/humainpodcast/  – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidyakobovitch/  – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HumainPodcast/  – HumAIn Website Articles: https://www.humainpodcast.com/blog/  Outline:  Here’s the timestamps for the episode:  (05:20)- So I am a mechanical engineer by training. And I started my graduate research in semiconductor technologies with applications in biotech almost more than a decade ago, in the early 2010s. I was a Doctoral Fellow at IBM labs here in San Jose, California. And then I also ended up writing some successful federal grants with a gene sequencing pioneer at Stanford, and Ron Davis, before I went, ended up going to UC Berkeley for grad school research, and then I became a visiting researcher.   (09:28)- An average cost of bringing a drug to market is around $2.6 billion. It takes around 10 to 15 years, like from the earliest days of discovery, to launching into the market. And unfortunately, more than 96% of all drug R&D actually fails . This is a really bad social model. This creates this enormous burden on our society and our healthcare spending as well. One of the reasons I started NextNet was when I was running Mekonos, I kept on seeing a lot of our customers had this tremendous pain point of, where you go, there's all this demand and subject matter experts, as scientists, they're actually working with very little of the available biomedical evidence out there. And a lot of the times that actually leads to false discoveries.  (13:40)- And so there are tools, they're all this plethora of bioinformatics tools and software and databases out there that are plagued with program bugs. They mostly lack documentation or have very complicated documentation and best, very technical UI’s. And for an average scientist or an average person in this industry, you really need to have a fairly deep grasp or a sophisticated understanding of database schemas and SQL querying and statistical modeling and coding and data science.   (22:36)- So, a transformer is potentially one of the greatest breakthroughs that has happened in NLP recently. It's basically a neural net architecture that was incorporated into NLP models by Google Brain resea