Cluster Hire in AI for Community Health

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

The increasing adoption of mobile health (mHealth) technology has created an unprecedented opportunity to address key challenges facing the US healthcare system to improve health outcomes and reduce the cost of care, particularly for patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart failure. mHealth technologies provide a means to measure health-related variables from a patient’s daily life environment and deliver health-related messaging, motivation, and other forms of intervention to patients in real-time. Via this feedback loop, patients can be given new tools for achieving their health-related goals while working more effectively with care-providers. Additionally, insights into the structural barriers to health improvements, such as a lack of safe and accessible recreational areas, can be obtained to inform community development and public policy. Moreover, these technologies can improve access to care for rural populations, by allowing care providers to assay a patient's health status without inpatient visits or nursing outcall. Achieving these goals requires advances in multiple research areas, including (but not limited to):

Machine learning methods that can leverage high volume streaming sensor data to infer states of health and behavior,
Novel adaptive intervention designs that can deliver just-in-time feedback and motivation,
Control systems modeling and optimization approaches for such real-time interventions,
Artificial intelligence and data mining approaches to extracting risk factors for health and disease from clinical databases (e.g., electronic health records) and longitudinal cohort studies,
Human-computer interaction and human factors research in developing solutions via participatory design while addressing ethical and privacy concerns.

Following the success of the cluster hire in the 2023-2024 hiring season, we anticipate hiring additional faculty in subsequent years. For the 2024-25 hiring season, we have one position open in the Siebel School for Computing and Data Science.