Xiaohui Xie, a computer scientist at the University of California, Irvine, is also applying AI to the genome, though with a broader focus than autism. He, too, hopes to classify any mutations by the odds they are harmful. But he cautions that in genomics, deep learning systems are only as good as the data sets on which they are trained. “Right now I think people are skeptical” that such systems can reliably parse the genome, he says. “But I think down the road more and more people will embrace deep learning.”

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