59, Chief AI Officer
Why He’s Interesting: Shahshahani is the first chief AI officer of the Cleveland Clinic, where he oversees strategies for the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence in the healthcare system.
Ping Pong: Shahshahani’s love for electrical engineering began in high school tinkering with transistor radios and electronic kits. He bought a kit for the game Pong, but after days of assembling it, he plugged it in and it didn’t work. After I went through the class, I went back and opened the kit, and I had a hypothesis that there must be something wrong with the board where the oscillator is not communicating with the system, and therefore I just connected those with the wire and it started working. And by then, I had absolutely no interest in playing Pong anymore.”
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Advanced care: Shahshahani has worked in the AI field since the '90s at IBM, Google, Yahoo and Pandora. “A big portion of the use cases that are ready to be applied to healthcare, things like ambient listening, using speech recognizers, summarizing notes for doctors or automating coding.”
Surfer Dude: “When my wife and I first moved to California, we lived in Santa Cruz. Being close to the beach and having the opportunity of doing longboard surfing, I made the mistake of growing long hair. I think I’ve successfully erased all those pictures.”
Schnauzer Walks: With his two sons away at college, Shahshahani and his wife, Lynne, enjoy walks with their schnauzer, Boba. “I thought my son named the dog Boba after Boba Fett from Star Wars, but it was actually because they were having boba tea.”
Cleveland Bucket List: Shahshahani is still based in the Bay Area and works remotely, but he does visit Cleveland. “It’s on my list to go visit one of the orchestras and maybe a Cavaliers game at some point. But I think it’s a great town.”
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