"AI for Population Health" - Bryan Wilder, Harvard University

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

This event is part of the AI for Social Impact Seminar Series hosted by Penn State's Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.

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“AI for Population Health”

As exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, our health and wellbeing depend on a difficult-to-measure web of societal factors and individual behaviors. AI can help us untangle this web and optimize interventions to improve health at a population level, especially for marginalized groups. However, population health applications raise new computational challenges, requiring us to make sense of limited data and optimize decisions under the resulting uncertainty. This talk presents methodological developments in machine learning, optimization, and social networks which are motivated by on-the-ground collaborations on HIV prevention, tuberculosis treatment, and the COVID-19 response. These projects have produced deployed applications and policy impact. For example, I will present the development of an AI-augmented intervention for HIV prevention among homeless youth. This system was deployed and evaluated in a field test enrolling over 700 youth and found to significantly reduce the prevalence of key risk behaviors for HIV.

About the Speaker

Bryan Wilder is a final-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Harvard University, where he is advised by Milind Tambe. His research focuses on the intersection of optimization, machine learning, and social networks, with the goal of improving population health. His work has received or been nominated for best paper awards at ICML and AAMAS, and was a finalist for the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR competition. He is supported by the Siebel Scholars program and previously received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.