GLASS Project

The projects for Tandon Honors students in the Global Leaders & Scholars in STEM program consists of a culmination of various experiences, research, and interests related to the Tandon Areas of Research Excellence. Scholars are also required to address the NAE Grand Challenges and think about the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals when doing so. At the end of the 3 years in the GLASS Program, students have a better understanding of the impact they can have on changing the world for the better. GLASS students enter the world as globally competent and socially responsible innovators and engineers!

My Interests and Why:

My interest is in exploring the use of data science and computational models in complex real-world problems like health care and improving decision-making in such domains. Healthcare decisions are inherently faced with uncertainty, incompleteness, and are often life-altering decisions. This presents an opportunity for studying quantitative methods and techniques in the process of improving decisions in complex systems. I am motivated by this intersection between biology, mathematics, systems, and understanding scientific but practical tools.

What is being done, and what I did

There is a substantial body of research and development happening where Artificial Intelligence and data-driven methods are used in aiding medical decision making, like diagnosis, predicting risk or recommending a treatment plan. These methods are trying to make sense out of a massive amount of data to find trends invisible to human beings.

What I studied in my research was the idea that these computational methods can be utilized more responsibly. I studied how models are responsible not only in terms of accuracy but also when they don't know something. I shifted my focus from simply finding the right or wrong decision to finding how a system acknowledges uncertainty. This is very critical because it pushes us to develop the role of computation from simply replacing human decision making to assisting human decision making, in problems that can be complex or ill-defined.

What is next in line for me?

Data science and AI will continue to grow, more prominently, in healthcare for disease prediction, personalizing treatment, or managing healthcare systems on a broad scale. Along with the advancements in this direction, there is also increasing awareness of issues like fairness, interpretability, and reliability.

So it is expected that we would see even more of a human and AI combination in many more such problems; we would need even better quality data, more robust models to deal with uncertainty. Such innovations are surely going to make our healthcare system more effective, accessible and we will also would have many more interesting and deep questions related to ethics, responsibility, and decision making in these complex systems.