Talks

• 2026-05-06 Most AI Agents Are Toys. These Ones Treat Cancer
  Dev in the Details #11
  Ian talks with Dev about building trustworthy AI agents for cancer care. They cover the pre-LLM clinical NLP era, the open-source BioMCP project, and what separates an agent from a workflow. They close on AI and labor displacement.
• 2025-10-23 BioMCP: Biomedical Model Context Protocol
  St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
  A language model connected to trusted tools and curated data beats a stand-alone chatbot for biomedical research. This talk introduces BioMCP and demos live trial search, literature review, and variant interpretation. It closes with a look at validated agents running behind hospital firewalls.
• 2024-06-27 Precision Oncology, Convergence of Genomics and AI, and Improving Cancer Care
  Lay of the Land #172
  Ian joins Jeffrey Stern on this Cleveland podcast to tell the GenomOncology story. They cover the falling cost of genome sequencing and the pathology workbench that about fifty labs use. Ian explains why clinical decision support needs curated knowledge behind the language model.
• 2024-04-16 Building GPT Actions with FastAPI and Pydantic
  Talk Python To Me #456
  Ian returns to Talk Python To Me to explain custom GPTs. FastAPI and Pydantic generate the OpenAPI spec that powers a GPT's actions, and most of the work goes into endpoint and field descriptions. The episode also surveys prompt engineering, RAG, and local models as of early 2024.
• 2024-03-07 The Intersection of AI and Genomic Analysis
  Bell Falls Search Focus On Talent Podcast
  Ian joins Ron Laneve on the Bell Falls Search podcast to trace a nonlinear career from a Commodore 64 to CTO of GenomOncology. They cover the founding of the company, biomarker-driven trial matching, and career advice for students and experienced engineers. Ian closes with his view of generative AI as a new form of automation.
• 2023-06-19 Grounding Medical Q&A using ChatGPT Plugins and Knowledge Graphs
  CI4CC Community Call
  Language models hallucinate on medical questions because they predict what an answer should sound like. This 2023 CI4CC talk connects ChatGPT to a curated knowledge graph through a plugin. The grounded answers carry source URLs, and the ungrounded ones confuse melanoma stages.
• 2018-03-07 Python in Biology and Genomics
  Talk Python To Me #154
  Ian talks with Michael Kennedy about Python in cancer genomics. GenomOncology uses Django, spaCy, and AsyncIO to interpret genomic variants and match patients to trials and therapies. The episode walks through the biology in plain terms first.