Bio

Dr. Hswen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Bakar Computational Health Institute at the University of California San Francisco. She holds an Adjunct Faculty Position in the Computational Epidemiology Lab at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Hswen graduated with a Doctoral Degree in social and computational epidemiology at Harvard University where she focused on leveraging online big data to uncover social patterns of disease and to inform the development of interventions to improve the health and well-being of the most marginalized subgroups of the population. 

 

Dr. Hswen's recent focus lies in exploring the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to imitate human attributes - delving into the ability to replace communication. Will AI supplant humans, and be able to replace and replicate emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger or disgust? Dr. Hswen seeks to unravel the ethical questions surrounding AI's ability to interpret and form empathy while also simultaneously mimicking or evaluating disgust and discrimination.

 

Dr. Hswen delves into the capacity of new generative AI tools to exhibit empathy and accurately detect negative emotions and treatment towards patients, juxtaposed against human assessment. Dr. Hswen investigates innovative evaluation methodologies, encompassing human manual curation and traditional AI sentiment analysis tools, to discern the proficiency of large language models in comprehending communication nuances and emotional cues.

 

Furthermore, Dr. Hswen is concerned with the implications of a potential conflict between AI advancement and the preservation of humanity and its cultural fabric. This exploration includes investigations into cognitive complacency and automatic biases that may emerge if society overly relies on AI, potentially leading to a diminishment of diversity and the erosion of the creativity and innovation. Dr. Hswen is actively involved in conceptualizing and conducting novel empirical studies aimed at elucidating these ethical debates and emerging philosophies.

 

 

Positions

Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Baker Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California San Francisco, 2020

Visiting Professor, Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE), 2019

Faculty, Innovation Program, Boston Children's Hospital, 2019

Post-Doctoral Fellow, Computational Epidemiology Lab, Harvard Medical School, 2019

Doctoral Student, Social and Computational Epidemiology, Harvard University, 2019

Selected Publications

  1. Hswen, Yulin, Qin, Qiuyuan, Williams, David R, Viswanath, K, Brownstein, John S, & Subramanian, S.V. (2020). The Relationship between Jim Crow Laws and Social Capital from 1997-2004: A 3-Level Multilevel Hierarchical Analysis Across Time, Country and State. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 113142.
  2. Xiong, J., Hswen, Y., & Naslund, J. A. (2020). Digital Surveillance for Monitoring Environmental Health Threats: A Case Study Capturing Public Opinion from Twitter about the 2019 Chennai Water Crisis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(14), 5077.
  3. Hswen, Y., Zhang, A., Freifeld, C., & Brownstein, J. S. (2020). Evaluation of Volume of News Reporting and Opioid-Related Deaths in the United States: Comparative Analysis Study of Geographic and Socioeconomic Differences. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(7), e17693.
  4. Rader, B., Astley, C. M., Sy, K. T. L., Sewalk, K., Hswen, Y., Brownstein, J. S., & Kraemer, M. U. (2020). Geographic access to United States SARS-CoV-2 testing sites highlights healthcare disparities and may bias transmission estimates. Journal of travel medicine.
  5. Hswen, Y., Zhang, A., Sewalk, K., Tuli, G., Brownstein, J. S., & Hawkins, J. B. (2020). Use of social media to assess the impact of equitable state policies on LGBTQ patient experiences: An exploratory study. In Healthcare (p. 100410). Elsevier.
more 

Areas of Interest

Computational Epidemiology; Population Informatics; Social Justice; Inequities in Health; Social Media