Machine Learning in

Public Health

2021 Theme:

How do we best leverage prediction in planning?

Public and population health are at the heart of structural approaches to counteract inequality and build pluralistic futures that improve the health and well-being of populations. This year we also broaden and integrate discussion on machine learning in the closely related area of urban planning, which is concerned with the technical and political processes regarding the development and design of land use. This includes the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, distribution networks, sanitation, protection and use of the environment, including their accessibility and equity.

Workshop schedule (requires NeurIPS registration): https://nips.cc/virtual/2021/workshop/21834.

Contact ml.pubhealth@gmail.com with questions.

Public health and population health refer to the study of daily life factors, prevention efforts, and their effects on the health of populations. Building on the success of our first workshop at NeurIPS 2020, this workshop will focus on data and algorithms related to the non-medical conditions that shape our health including structural, lifestyle, policy, social, behavior and environmental factors. Data that is traditionally used in machine learning and health problems are really about our interactions with the health care system, and this workshop aims to balance this with machine learning work using data on non-medical conditions. We expect contributions on, but not limited to the following areas:

  • Data: feature generation from internet/mobile datasets relevant to health, privacy and security challenges related to public health and urban planning data and tasks, ascertainment of data to measure and define factors related to social disparities

  • Methods: methods for combining non-clinical and clinical data for public and population health applications, algorithms for public health and urban planning goals, model transport across environments, spatial analyses

  • Policy and implementation: ML approaches for mitigating disparities, identifying methodological assumptions that fail in public health and urban planning settings, human and ML interaction in the public health and urban planning context

  • Health Topics: ML integration in infectious disease models, improving non-communicable disease surveillance and prediction using ML, health equity

Title image: From the Public Spaces Development Program in Tatarstan, Russia, which created over 350 public spaces
From: https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/tatarstan-parks/