Modeling to Inform Disease Control, Screening, Treatment Policies, and Prevention Interventions

Motivation

AI tools can be used to inform social work, public health policy, and medical decision making.  For example, predictive analytics can be used to identify risk factors for disease; and optimization frameworks (whether single stage or repeated) can be used to identify when to screen or treat disease, or which risk groups to target given limited resources.  We describe several projects and potential project areas below.

Using Machine Learning and Multi-Agent Planning to Fight Tuberculosis

Fighting and Preventing Tuberculosis in India

Tuberculosis is one of the top 10 killers in the world and is especially prevalent in India. AI can help across the entire pipeline of care, from decision support tools for planning active screening routes, to predictive algorithms for resource constrained health workers to deliver targeted interventions to patients.

Using Social Networks for Prevention Interventions

HIV prevention among homeless youth

This project focuses on the development of decision support systems for homeless youth drop-in center staff, who need to find the most influential homeless youth to raise awareness about HIV (and other STDs) among their peers, and to drive the homeless youth community towards safer behaviors.  View HIV Prevention among Homeless Youth by Influence Maximization.

Substance abuse prevention among homeless youth

Research has consistently documented levels of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, alcohol, and marijuana use and abuse among these adolescents that far exceed that of housed adolescents.  This Social Networks and Substance Abuse Prevention for Homeless Youth project aims to use algorithms to determine the best group formations to prevent regular use of hard drugs among homeless youth.

Suicide prevention among active duty military and homeless youth

One of the fundamental questions facing social science is how social networks and the cognitions people have about their networks affect their mental states and mental health.  AI techniques present an opportunity to dynamically model social networks and the messages transmitted across those networks to create predictive models of influence unavailable with standard statistical techniques.  View Predictive Modeling for Early Identification of Suicidal Thinking.

Previous work