A.I. in health care in Paris

Here's tomorrow's conference agenda for the opening day of the  Redefining Health Care in the Age of A.I. conference in Paris.  Philippe Aghion will speak on "Should we fear AI?"
My talk is about  "Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale."

Day 1 – Tuesday 8 September

8:00 am

Opening of the Sorbonne

8:15 am

Attendee registration and welcome coffee with viennoiseries

9:15 am

Introduction by Nature Editors and PITOR Institute
Magdalena Skipper, Joao Monteiro and Alexandre Loupy

9:40 am

Day opening lecture: Should we fear AI?

Philippe Aghion – Nobel Prize Laureate

Chaired by Magdalena Skipper

10:20 am

Keynote: Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale

Alvin Roth – Nobel Prize Laureate

Chaired by Alexandre Loupy

11:00 am

Imaging and diagnostic models
Chaired by Alexandre Loupy and Sadra Bakhshandeh

11:00 am

From Pixel to Patient: AI for Multimodal Medical Imaging

Julia Schnabel

11:30 am

Foundation models bridging molecular information and pathology

Guangyu Wang

12:00 pm

Building Trustworthy AI for Clinical Decision-Making

Roxana Daneshjou

12:30 pm

Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)

Disparate privacy risks from medical AI: a new axis of health inequality

Moritz Knolle, Technical University of Munich (TUM)

12:45 pm

Lunch break

2:15 pm

Meet the Nature editors
Joao Monteiro, Magdalena Skipper, George Caputa, Lorenzo Righetto, Monica Wang, Ananya Rastogi, Sadra Bakhshandeh and Wanying Wang

3:15 pm

Keynote: Towards conversational diagnostic artificial intelligence

Alan Karthikesalingam

Chaired by George Caputa

3:55 pm

Coffee break

4:30 pm

Foundation models and drug discovery
Chaired by Roxana Daneshjou and George Caputa

4:30 pm

Six Aging Clocks Confirmed Biological Age Reversal in Phase IIa Trial of a Novel Therapeutic Discovered Using Aging Research and Generative AI

Alex Zhavoronkov

5:00 pm

Building AI for Biological Reasoning: Towards Biological Artificial Superintelligence

Thomas Clozel

5:30 pm

Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)

When AI meets the emergency department: rethinking how we evaluate clinical AI

Austin Schoeffler, Stanford University

5:45 pm

Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)

Testing levels of LLM agent autonomy in inpatient treatment decisions: a prospective, silent-mode evaluation of vancomycin dosing

Yixing Jiang, Stanford University & Kameron C. Black, Stanford Health Care

6:00 pm

Roundtable: Opportunities and limits in implementing AI in healthcare
Effy Vayena, Demilade Adedinsewo, Jessilyn Dunn, James Zou, and Marco Marsella
Moderated by Alexandre Loupy and George Caputa

7:00 pm

Poster session with wine and cheese

 

Redefining Healthcare in the Age of A.I., Paris, Sept 8-10

 I'm in Paris, for the conference Redefining Healthcare in the Age of AI 

"The Paris Institute for Transplantation and Organ Regeneration (PITOR) is delighted to announce the first Nature Conference in Europe dedicated to artificial intelligence in medicine, taking place in Paris from 8–10 September 2026.

Held under the High Patronage of the President of the French Republic, the conference will bring together 28 leading international experts, including two Nobel Prize laureates, as well as the Editors-in-Chief of Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Reviews Engineering, Nature Reviews Nephrology, and Nature Health. The meeting will be held in the historic amphitheater of the Sorbonne.

Topics will include:

    Medical imaging and diagnostics
    Ethics and regulation
    Medical robotics and wearable technologies
    Agentic AI and clinical decision support
    Drug discovery and repurposing
 

MAID in France

 After a multi-year legislative struggle, France's  Assemblée Nationale legalized medical aid in dying for some patients.

Le Monde has the story:

What's in France's assisted-dying law?
The law adopted on Wednesday establishes the right to assisted suicide or euthanasia for patients experiencing constant suffering from serious and incurable illnesses, under strictly regulated conditions.
By Béatrice Jérôme 

"With this bill, we are facing death head-on," declared French President Emmanuel Macron on March 10, 2024. More than two years later, the Assemblée Nationale cast a definitive vote on Wednesday, July 15, on the bill establishing a right to assisted dying. With the adoption of the law, France joins 11 other countries where people with severe illnesses can obtain a lethal substance on medical prescription, based on criteria varying from one legal system to another.

"The "French end-of-life model," a phrase Macron used in 2023, originated from the president's own initiative. However, its design resulted solely from the work of MPs after four rounds of readings, the Sénat having rejected the bill three times. Supporters have praised the bill as "balanced" and "secure," offering safeguards to ensure that recourse to assisted dying remains "an exception." Its critics, however, argue that the "safeguards" provided are not sufficient for preventing "abuse."

##########

 The Catholic Courier summarizes some of the opposition to the bill:

France’s bishops criticize vote legalizing ‘assisted dying’
Caroline De Sury/OSV News | 07.16.2026

"PARIS (OSV News) — France’s bishops are strongly criticizing a “radical choice” made by French lawmakers to legalize “assisted dying.”

"A watershed vote by the National Assembly July 15 legalized assisted dying, including euthanasia and assisted suicide in certain cases.

"Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline of Marseille and president of the bishops’ conference, lamented that “members of parliament have enshrined in French law the possibility of causing death.” 

...

"For the bishops, one of the greatest dangers of the law stems from the fact that the principle that death can constitute a medical response to suffering has now become part of the legal heritage of the country. The choice to die can then be asserted as a right that could be extended to others.

“Experience in other countries shows that the criteria for access to assisted dying always tend to broaden, to the detriment of palliative care,” they noted.

"Meanwhile, “the effects of such legislation are not yet fully measured, but they are already taking shape,” the bishops warned. “Our relationship to vulnerability, old age, disability, and illness will change,” they added.

“The poorest are likely to be the first to pay the price: not wanting to be a burden on their children or grandchildren, elderly people in precarious situations may feel pressured to die,” the prelates warned.

"Catholic care facilities could face legal action for refusing euthanasia, assisted suicide on their premises
For the bishops today, the most immediate and concrete concern is that, if the law goes into effect, care facilities — foremost among them Catholic institutions — could face legal action if they refuse to allow euthanasia or assisted suicide to take place on their premises. As it stands, the law will require the head of the facility or department to authorize outside practitioners to perform the lethal procedure.

"The bishops have therefore announced that they will “closely monitor the referrals to the Constitutional Council” that were announced prior to the vote. 

...

"On July 14, while France was celebrating Bastille Day — the country’s biggest national holiday — Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu surprised many by announcing that he would appeal to the Constitutional Council to submit the text of this law — to which he is personally opposed — for review. He justified this final recourse by citing the lack of agreement between the two chambers, the National Assembly and the Senate. A few days earlier, Senate President Gérard Larcher had announced his intention to take the same step.

"The Constitutional Council may approve the entire bill, strike down certain provisions, or issue interpretive reservations before the law is promulgated by Macron. The referral requested by the prime minister will focus in particular on the absence of a conscience clause allowing healthcare facilities — such as the Catholic nursing homes run by the Little Sisters of the Poor — to be legally authorized to refuse to provide such “assisted dying” services on their premises.

"Pending the outcome of the appeal, the bishops of France have reiterated their call to Catholics in France to “bear witness that another path is possible — one of faithful presence and attentive care that alleviates physical or psychological suffering, without ever abandoning anyone.” 

 

French nicotine pouch ban is ‘attack on Swedish way of life’

 Is Swedish nicotine like French wine?

The FT has the story:

"French nicotine pouch ban is ‘attack on Swedish way of life’, minister says. Stockholm smoulders over France’s ‘absurd’ penalties of up to five years in prison for cigarette alternatives, by Mari Novik in Strasbourg and Sarah White in Paris

 "A Swedish minister has accused France of mounting “an attack on the Swedish way of living” with its ban on nicotine pouches, setting aflame a single market fight over how governments should regulate smoke-free alternatives to tobacco.

"France last month implemented one of Europe’s strictest bans on the pouches, a flavoured sachet that users tuck under their lip to release nicotine.

"France’s decree goes beyond other EU countries’ prohibitions by banning not just sales but import, possession and use of the pouches. A Swede carrying a tin of pouches legally bought at home could face French penalties of up to five years in prison and a €375,000 fine.
 

“It is as if we would prohibit French baguettes or French wine in Sweden,” Swedish trade minister Benjamin Dousa told the FT. “It is absurd.”

#########

Earlier:

Tuesday, May 19, 2026  WHO reports on the global growth of nicotine pouches

French medical residents struggle without a way for couples to match together

 Esther Duflo sent me a link to the story below in Le Monde, describing the difficulty facing married doctors in France who wish to match to first jobs in the same city.

If I understand correctly, the old system ranked students by their exam results on the  épreuves classantes nationales (ECN), after which the students  then chose among the jobs available to them in rank order. A couple could decide to choose jobs at the same time, by waiting till the turn of the worse ranked member of the couple.  In this way they could choose two jobs in the same city.  But a new system ranks doctors differently, by specialties, and resolves itself for everyone at the same time. So couples can now have no way to assure themselves of being matched in the same city. 

Here's the article (which I sense isn't completely clear either in English translation or in the original French): 

"We are pawns to be moved": the geographical conundrum of medical intern couples
Since the last reform of medical studies, the algorithm that distributes future interns in the university hospitals of France no longer guarantees their assignment in the same city as their partner.  By Diane Merveilleux 

" Since 2023, the three-day ECNs giving rise to a single national ranking have been replaced by a sixth year punctuated by tests in the form of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in October, then oral exams in the spring, which make it possible to establish 13 rankings by specialty groups.

"When summer comes, each student makes up to 80 wishes, a wish corresponding to a specialty in a city. Then an algorithm makes it possible to assign each person an assignment according to the ranking of their wishes. This algorithm will run eight times, each time simulating a final result and allowing students to adapt their wishes and review their ambitions. Their final assignment falls at the same time for everyone, at the end of the last round, in September. They are then hired for four to six years of boarding in the same place, without any possibility of change.

"For young medical couples, this is where the problem lies: those who would like to spend these years in the same city have no way of being sure.

...

"Thus, until 2023, the national ranking led students to choose their assignment one after the other – the first, then the second, and so on. In this configuration, the member of the couple who had obtained the highest score could "downgrade" themselves to join their partner's level so that they could make their decision at the same time. "Today, this downgrading is no longer possible, it's the very principle of the algorithm: we have a system that is totally different," says Philippe Touzy."

########## 

It seems that the couples algorithm that they have abandoned is much more primitive than the Roth-Peranson algorithm* now used in the American medical match, which allows couples to submit much more expressive joint preferences over pairs of jobs.

As it happens, just a few years ago there was a proposal for a two-part match that would have inadvertently disabled the US couples match.  Itai Ashlagi and I were able to convince the American Medical Association (which had sponsored the proposal) that it was a bad idea.  We ran the match under a variety of conditions.  So Itai  has an efficient implementation of the Roth-Peranson algorithm available if it could be helpful in France.

Here’s a blog post about that…

Friday, April 21, 2023

Transition from medical school to residency: defending the parts that work well (namely the NRMP Resident Match)

########

* 

 From     Roth, Alvin E. "What have we learned from market design?" Reprinted with a postscript in The Handbook of Market Design, Nir Vulkan, Alvin E. Roth and Zvika Neeman editors, Oxford University Press, 2013, Chapter 1, 7-50

Medical aid in dying advances in France

 The proposed French law has some familiar and some novel features.

Reuters has the story:

French lawmakers approve assisted dying bill, paving the way for approval
By Elizabeth Pineau May 27, 2025

"- French lower house lawmakers approved a bill on Tuesday to legalise assisted dying, paving the way for France to become the latest European nation to allow terminally ill people to end their lives.
 

"The final passage of the bill remains some way off, with the text now heading to the Senate. However, the legislation is expected to pass, with polls showing more than 90% of French people in favour of laws that give people with terminal diseases or interminable suffering the right to die.

...

"The bill, which was approved in parliament by 305 votes to 199, provides the right to assisted dying to any French person over the age of 18 suffering from a serious or incurable condition that is life-threatening, advanced or terminal.
 

"The person, who must freely make their decision, must also have constant physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated. Lawmakers stipulated that psychological suffering alone would not be enough to end one's life.
 

"The patient can administer the lethal dose themselves or by an accredited medical professional if they are physically unable. Healthcare workers who object to doing so are free to opt out. Anyone found to have obstructed someone's right to die can face a two-year prison sentence and a 30,000 euro fine.

"Laws to enable assisted dying are gathering steam across Europe. In November, British lawmakers voted in favour of allowing assisted dying, paving the way for Britain to follow countries such as Australia, Canada and some U.S. states in what would be the biggest social reform in a generation.
 

"In March, the Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown Dependency off northwest England, approved an assisted dying bill, potentially making the island the first place in the British Isles where terminally ill people could end their lives.
 

"France is one of the last countries in Western Europe to legislate on this issue," leftist lawmaker Olivier Falorni told Reuters. "We are in a global process ... France is behind, and I hope we will do it with our own model."

 

 

HT: Alex Chan

YingHua He 何 英华 has died.

 Yan Chen passes on the devastating news that YingHua He 何 英华 passed away on Tuesday night, after struggling with kidney cancer.

May his memory be a blessing.

He graduated from college in China in 2001, got an MA at Peking University, received his Ph.D. at Columbia in 2011, taught in Toulouse, and was an associate professor at Rice University when he died.

Here's his CV, and here is his Google Scholar page.  He did important work on market design, including on school choice and kidney exchange.

He was one of the pioneers of empirical market design, combining econometrics with matching theory. 

He had many friends, and I was lucky to be among them. Here's a photo I took of him giving a seminar at Stanford, when he was a visiting scholar in 2014-15

Yinghua He at Stanford, January 2015

Here are some of my blog posts on his work:

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Multiple offer mechanisms in school choice, when information gathering is costly

Sunday, November 6, 2022

Limiting congestion by limiting applications, or making them costly

Sunday, September 13, 2020

A proposal for non-simultaneous kidney exchange in pairs and chains and with deceased donors...

Friday, May 24, 2019

Matching early when information is costly, by Grenet, He, and Kübler

The Matching Society by Melchior Simioni and Philippe Steiner

"If we put on the glasses of economic sociology, it appears ... that matching corresponds to a specific form of coordination close but distinct from both planning and the market."

That's a sentence that caught my eye (using Google translate) from the recent book by the French sociologists Melchior Simioni and Philippe Steiner

La société du matching (The Matching Society) 

Here's how the publisher's web page introduces it:

"The upheavals brought about by the irruption of matching technology, in all its dimensions, are updating major challenges in our societies. The matching society is not the future of our modern societies, it is its present. The ambition of this essay is to to understand what it changes in our lives.  

"At several decisive stages of our lives, we entrust our fate to algorithms that sort individuals according to a very singular pattern: we choose and we are chosen at the same time. Access to resources as essential as training (with Parcoursup or Affelnet), a romantic partner (Tinder, Meetic and so many others), certain care or a job depends on this technology.

"Unlike the market relationship, where paying is enough, or social benefits, which are paid as a matter of right, matching presupposes a new social relationship: we express our wishes according to the information at our disposal and it is on the basis of the data we provide that the selection is made.

"This principle profoundly changes our relationship with the collective. Because it forces us to tell the truth about ourselves, our hopes, our desires, it accelerates the advent of a singularist society."

########

I've had occasion to blog about the work of Professor Steiner before:

Friday, August 12, 2022

Are sociology and economics coming closer together? Philippe Steiner in Acta Oeconomica

Monday, November 30, 2020

Philippe Steiner on matching and romance, and transplants

France amends its constitution to protect access to abortion

 The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v.Wade and end a constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. prompted France to amend its constitution to guarantee access to abortion.

Here's the WSJ story:

France becomes first country to explicitly enshrine abortion rights in constitution  By Karla Adam

"With the endorsement of a specially convened session of lawmakers at the Palace of Versailles, France on Monday became the first country in the world to explicitly enshrine abortion rights in its constitution — an effort galvanized by the rollback of protections in the United States.

"The amendment referring to abortion as a “guaranteed freedom” passed by a vote of 780 in favor and 72 against, far above the required threshold of support from three-fifths of lawmakers, or 512 votes.

"French President Emmanuel Macron announced that a “sealing ceremony,” a tradition reserved for the most significant laws, would take place Friday, coinciding with International Women’s Day.

“We’re sending a message to all women: Your body belongs to you, and no one can decide for you,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told lawmakers assembled in Versailles."*

#########

Le Monde has the story, in an editorial supporting the amendment:

Enshrining abortion access in the French Constitution is a win for feminism and democracy, EDITORIAL, Le Monde, March 4

"The joint session of both houses of Parliament convened in Versailles on Monday, March 4, to enshrine access to abortion in the French Constitution, marks an important moment in the life of the nation. And a proud moment, too. A few days before International Women's Rights Day on March 8, women's freedom to control their own bodies should be anchored in French law. It also comes at a time when abortion, once thought to be a widely accepted procedure, is being undermined in a number of democracies, most notably the United States.

...

"The three-fifths majority required in Parliament means that a consensus has been reached, despite the fact that abortion still disgusts some on the right and far right. It's a sign that democracy works, despite the distress signals it is sending out.

"At every stage of the lengthy procedure initiated in November 2022, the drafting of the Constitutional reform constantly required perseverance and tact. First in the Assemblée Nationale, where, in response to the shockwave caused in June 2022 by the US Supreme Court's decision to revoke the federal right to abortion, the radical-left La France Insoumise party and the center-right presidential majority agreed to work together on a common cause.

"Then the fight continued in the Sénat, where, in loyalty to Simone Veil's 1975 battle to decriminalize abortion, a number of right-wing Les Républicains elected representatives fought hard to ensure that the debate, which they had reframed, could continue against the advice of their group's president, Bruno Retailleau, and Sénat President Gérard Larcher. Finally, in the government, Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti facilitated the drafting and adoption of the final text. The compromise consists of enshrining the notion of "guaranteed freedom" for women to have access to abortion, without introducing an enforceable "right" to abortion as demanded by the left."

#######

*Regarding the Prime Minister's remark to women that "no one can decide for you" I note that surrogacy remains illegal in France.

Friday, October 18, 2019

Will IVF become more widely legal in France?

Market design conferences: Marseille, 11 – 15 December, and Santiago 18-20 December, 2023

 Here's the conference announcement from Marseille: 

From matchings to markets. A tale of Mathematics, Economics and Computer Science. Des matchings aux marchés. Une histoire de mathématiques. 11 – 15 December 2023, at the CIRM center in Marseille, France.

"This conference aims at gathering researchers from the fields of mathematics, computer science and economics (broadly defined) sharing common interests in the study of matching problems and the design of their markets. The presentations can cover a wide variety of topics and methods: specific matching markets, general models, theory, empirical analysis. . . etc"

Scientific Committee 
Comité scientifique 

Nick Arnosti (University of Minnesota)
Michal Feldman (Tel Aviv University)
Alfred Galichon (Science Po & New York University)
Michael Jordan (University of Stanford)
Claire Mathieu (CNRS – Collège France)

Organizing Committee
Comité d’organisation

Nick Arnosti (University of Minnesota)
Julien Combe (CREST & École Polytechnique)
Claire Mathieu (CNRS – Paris)
Vianney Perchet (ENSAE & Criteo AI lab)

*******

And here's the announcement of the conference in Santiago:

'Market Design Workshop 18 - 20 December 2023 Santiago, Chile

Keynote Speakers

Omar Besbes

Columbia University

Personal Website

Nicole Immorlica

Microsoft Research New England

Personal Website

Alvin Roth

Stanford University

Personal Website

Participants

Itai Ashlagi

Stanford University

Martin Castillo

New York University

Francisco Castro

University of California

José Correa

Universidad de Chile

Sofía Correa

Universidad de Chile

Andrés Cristi

Universidad de Chile

Juan Escobar

Universidad de Chile

Maximilien Ficht

Universidad de Chile

Yannai Gonczarowski

Harvard University

Nima Haghpanah

Pennsylvania State University

Jason Hartline

Northwestern University

Tibor Heumann

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Rahmi Ilkilic

Universidad de Chile

Revi Jagadeesan

Stanford University

Max Klimm

Technische Universität Berlin

Tomás Larroucau

Arizona State University

Mariana Laverde

Boston College

Ilan Lobel

New York University

Alfonso Montes

Universidad de Chile

Marcelo Olivares

Universidad de Chile

Renato Paes Leme

Google Research New York

Juan Sebastián Pereyra

Universidad de Montevideo

Adriana Piazza

Universidad de Chile

Dana Pizarro

Universidad de O'Higgins

Marco Scarsini

Universidad Luiss Guido Carli

Vasiliki Skreta

University of Texas at Austin

Laura Vargas-Koch

ETH Zurich

Víctor Verdugo

Universidad de O'Higgins

Matt Weinberg

Princeton University

Gabriel Weintraub

Stanford University

Asaf Zeevi

Columbia University

School choice and related matching algorithms in France, by Vincent Iehlé and Julien Jacqmin

Here's a recent paper that looks at the assignment of students to some of France's Grandes Ecoles, and draws some conclusions about the preferences for those schools.

SIGEM : analyse de la procédure d’affectation dans les grandes écoles de management,, Vincent Iehlé, Julien Jacqmin, Dans Revue économique 2023/2 (Vol. 74), pages 139 à 168 (SIGEM: analysis of the assignment procedure in major management schools)

"First, we list the expected properties of the assignments produced by the SIGEM. To do this we identify the SIGEM algorithm. It is quite standard in this type of environment since it is the “schools” version of the algorithm of Gale and Shapley [1962]. Based on this information, we show that assignments satisfy a stability property that is crucial in educational systems since it guarantees fair treatment of declared wishes and rankings. On the other hand, the use of this version of the algorithm of Gale and Shapley [1962], in opposition to the "candidate" version, raises two reservations concerning, on the one hand, the sub-optimality of the assignments from the point of view candidates and, on the other, the theoretical absence of simple strategies for candidates to play when submitting their wishes. This theoretical analysis of the algorithm is completed by a discussion on the specificities of the SIGEM procedure which can explain the formation of strategic behaviors. The second contribution concerns the use made of the results of this procedure in the case of SIGEM. We show how post-assignment data is used to determine the influential ranking of SIGEM from the so-called cross-dismissal matrix, itself based on the candidates' revealed preferences and their final assignments. The last contribution concerns the exploitation of a stylized fact which justifies the joint analysis of the algorithm and the SIGEM classification. The post-assignment data indeed reveal the existence of a hierarchy of schools that is very rigid and that achieves a consensus among students. This point is particularly interesting because it finally allows to have a finer look at the theoretical properties of the algorithm, the alignment of the preferences of the candidates tending to limit the impact of the negative effects associated with the use of the version "schools" of the algorithm of Gale and Shapley [1962]."

...

"Figure 2 presents for each school the number of ranked candidates and the number of wishes expressed for the school among these ranked. It seems to confirm the existence of these voluntary self-censorship strategies. In particular, we observe a significant loss for schools of average attractiveness (for example, AUDENCIA, NEOMA, SKEMA) which are more likely to be subject to both downward and upward truncation on the part of candidates ."

********

Recall also, 

Strategic Issues in the French Academic Job Market, by Guillaume Haeringer, Vincent Iehlé In Revue économique Volume 61, Issue 4, 2010, pages 697 to 721