Researchers, clinicians, and engineers working at the crossroads of artificial intelligence and medicine got together once again this summer, and CCADD (Prof. Howard, David, Seeun) was there to join them. The occasion was the Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL) 2026, a three-day gathering hosted in Seattle, Washington from June 28th through 30th.

Among a handful of research groups that were extended an invitation to the conference, Prof. Howard traveled together with his team Dr. David and Seeun. What made the trip especially meaningful this year was the publication of a paper from the lab, "Generation of Biingual Synthetic Clinical Notes for Realistic Data Augmentation," which the team unveiled to the community at the conference. Standing beside their poster, they walked visitors through the motivation and findings of the work, answering questions from curious attendees.

This year marked the seventh gathering of CHIL, jointly hosted by Sage Bionetworks and Seattle Children's Research Institute and hosted at the Institute's B. Wayne Hughes Building. As always, the program spanned a broad cross-section of issues shaping AI's role in healthcare. The conference opened with a keynote from Dr. Chris Longhurst, CEO of Seattle Children's, who spoke on "Evidence-based Medicine in the AI Era" and made the case for grounding AI adoption in real clinical implementation rather than hype. Dr. Pang Wei Koh followed with an invited talk on reinforcement learning approaches for deep research, and Dr. Jessilyn Dunn later delivered a keynote on wearable technology for disease detection titled "The Digital Physiome." A track devoted entirely to mental health also drew particular attention, weaving together talks on evaluating harm in AI safety, personalizing psychotherapy through language models, and building governance frameworks informed by practitioners, which were all capped off with a lively panel discussion.

For the team, the days in Seattle offered far more than a chance to share their research. They came away with new perspectives, new connections, and a renewed sense of how much further this field still has to grow.