ETON Talk: Can I Trust the AI “I” Want to Learn How to Build? (video)
Image processing systems increasingly influence real-world decisions, from medical imaging and aviation vision systems to large-scale visual analytics and generative models. As AI tools become more accessible, many practitioners can now build image-based models before fully understanding when and whether those models should be trusted. This gap between technical capability and responsible use is especially critical in high-stakes domains.
This talk addresses a central question for emerging and experienced practitioners alike: What does it mean to trust an image-based AI system? Designed for a non-expert to expert audience, the session reframes trust as the outcome of concrete choices across the image processing pipeline, including data curation, labeling practices, evaluation metrics, and deployment context.
Using intuitive examples from healthcare and aviation, the talk illustrates how common decisions optimizing for accuracy alone, training on narrow visual distributions, or deploying opaque models can introduce bias, brittleness, and hidden risk. Rather than focusing on algorithms or mathematical detail, the session provides a practical mental model for progressing from “I can train an image model” to “I understand its limitations, uncertainty, and real-world impact.”
Attendees will leave with a structured framework for evaluating image processing systems not just by performance, but by their suitability, reliability, and accountability in real-world applications.
