Welcome to the Lab Page of Rumi Chunara, Associate Professor at New York University.
The overarching goal of our research is to develop computational and statistical approaches for acquiring, integrating and using data to improve population-level public health. We focus on the design and development of data mining and machine learning methods to address challenges related to data and goals of public health. Recent work focuses on causal, multi-level modeling for risk prediction as well as fairness and ethics in the design and use of data and algorithms embedded in social systems.
Considering health from a comprehensive, multi-level perspective means that the data we use comes from both inside and outside the clinic.
News:
*Two new papers on the future of public health, one in AJPH on Building Public Health Surveillance 3.0: Emerging Timely Measures of Physical, Economic, and Social Environmental Conditions Affecting Health, and the other to appear in Harvard Data Science Review on Data science in public health: building next generation capacity.
*PLOS Digital Health article on Generalizability challenges of mortality risk prediction models. Also featured on NYU Tandon news and ACM news. Great work Harvineet and Vishwali!
*New paper on Segmenting across places: The need for fair transfer learning with satellite imagery accepted for the CVPR workshop on Fair, Data-efficient, and Trusted computer vision, congrats Miao and team! 04/22
*New collaborative training program on Data Science for Social Determinants as part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa).
*Prof. Chunara gave a talk as part of the Suessmilch Lecture series at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research 10/21
*New papers in Nature Machine Intelligence and the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, see our Publications page for details.
*Vishwali’s paper on Causal Multi-level Fairness accepted to AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES). Congrats Vishwali! 04/2021
*New paper accepted to ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). Congratulations Harvineet and team! 12/2020
*Prof. Chunara and Yuan Zhao, along with a team from NYU Tandon and NYU Grossman School of Medicine published a paper on telemedicine and disparities during COVID-19 at NYU in JAMIA. 09/2020
*Prof. Chunara taught a short course on Data Science and Machine Learning in Public Health at NYU this summer. 08/2020
*Prof. Chunara gave an invited talk at the ICML Workshop on Healthcare Systems, Population Health, and the Role of Health-tech 07/2020
*Prof. Chunara gave a talk on Why We Need Pluralistic AI for medical students at the University of Calgary 07/2020
*Our group is running a monthly reading group on Machine Learning in Public and Population Health. Contact Prof. Chunara if interested.
*Prof. Chunara and Prof. Stephanie Cook published an opinion piece on Using digital data to protect and promote the most vulnerable in the fight against COVID-19 06/2020
*Nabeel successfully defended his PhD, congrats Dr. Rehman! 05/2020
*Prof. Chunara published an article on Think Global Health on using data in context for COVID-19 and beyond. 04/2020
*Vishwali’s work on Multi-Environment Functional Causal Models using Gaussian Processes will be presented at the ICLR workshop on Causal Learning for Decision Making, Congrats Vishwali! 04/2020
*First look at the Telemed experience at NYU during COVID-19 published in JAMIA with NYU Tandon and NYU Langone collaborators 04/2020
*Quantifying the localized relationship between vector containment activities and dengue incidence in a real-world setting: a spatial and time series modelling analysis based on geo-located data from Pakistan accepted for publication in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, congrats Nabeel! 04/2020
*New paper on “Quasi-experimental Designs for Assessing Response on Social Media to Policy Changes” accepted to ICWSM 2020, congrats Yijun! 03/2020
*Paper linking diversity in computing as a proactive step against biases, “No computation without representation: Avoiding data and algorithm biases through diversity” accepted to the Second International Ethics of Data Science Conference to be held in Sydney 03/2020
*Our paper on Population-aware Hierarchical Bayesian Domain Adaptation accepted to ACM CHIL, congrats Vishwali and Nabeel! 02/2020
*Our work unpacking the data generating process behind online acute respiratory infection posts by comparing them to microbiological infection status to appear in JMIR Public Health 02/2020
*New paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, congrats Vishwali! 01/2020
*Prof. Chunara will be speaking at the NSF CISE Career Workshop in April 2020
*Prof. Chunara gave a talk at UIUC, Department of Computer Science 12/2019
*Organizing a workshop on “ML-IRL: Machine Learning in Real Life” with Samantha Kleinberg at ICLR 2020.
*New paper on “Fair Predictors under Distribution Shift” accepted at Fair Machine Learning for Health Workshop at NeurIPS 2019 (spotlight presentation), congrats Harvineet, Rina and Vishwali!
*Paper on “Using Contextual Information to Improve Blood Glucose Prediction” accepted at Machine Learning for Healthcare conference 08/19
*Prof. Chunara will be presenting at the Joint Statistical Meeting 07/19
*Recipients of a Facebook research award (with Stephanie Cook) 05/19
*Excited to start work on our Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Exploration project. 05/19
*Our work on showing deep landscape features from satellite imagery improve disease prediction models accepted for presentation at the CVPR Workshop on Computer Vision for Global Challenges (oral presentation) 06/19
*Prof. Chunara gave Grand Rounds at Aga Khan University, Karachi 05/19
*Prof. Chunara giving talks at NYU Shanghai, the Oxford Suzhou Center for Advanced Research, Peking University and Tsinghua University 4/19
*Our paper “Race, Ethnicity and National Origin-based Discrimination in Social Media and Hate Crimes Across 100 U.S. Cities” accepted at ICWSM ’19.
*Prof. Chunara giving a talk at the Connective Media Brown Bag Lunch, Cornell Tech on 03/01
*Prof. Chunara received an NSF CAREER award! 01/19
*Our paper “Population-aware Hierarchical Bayesian Domain Adaptation” accepted at the NeurIPS Machine Learning for Health workshop 12/18
*Prof. Chunara gave an invited talk at the Epidemiology meets Data Mining and Knowledge discovery workshop at KDD 08/18
*“Creating Full Individual-level Location Timelines from Sparse Social Media Data” accepted as a full paper at ACM Sigspatial 2018. Congrats Nabeel!
*Paper accepted at CSCW 2018 “Socio-spatial Self-organizing Maps: Using Social Media to Assess Relevant Geographies for Exposure to Social Processes”. Congrats Kunal!
*New paper “Tracking Health Seeking Behavior During an Ebola Outbreak via Mobile Phones and SMS” accepted for publication in npj Digital Medicine 06/2018 (to appear)
*New paper on arxiv: Domain Adaptation for Infection Prediction from Symptoms Based on Data from Different Study Designs and Contexts 06/2018
*First assessment of what people Tweet about in comparison to actual illness: What Do People Tweet When They’re Sick? A Preliminary Comparison of Symptom Reports and Twitter Timelines, to be presented at ICWSM Workshop on Social Media and Health 06/2018
*Feasibility of a Social Network Based Vascular Risk Reduction Program for Mild Stroke Survivors accepted for presentation at the World Stroke Congress 05/2018
*New paper on Socio-spatial Self-organizing Maps: Using Social Media to Assess Relevant Geographies for Exposure to Social Processes on arxiv 3/2018.
*“From the User to the Medium: Neural Profiling Across Web Communities” accepted as poster paper at ICWSM 3/2018.
*We continue our exploration of the need for community-sourced data in public health in our new paper on Etiology of respiratory tract infections in the community and clinic in Ilorin, Nigeria accepted (BMC Research Notes) 12/2017
*Neighborhoods and Health book available for pre-order, containing our chapter on Quantitative Methods for Measuring Neighborhood Characteristics in collab with Dr. Dustin Duncan! 11/2017
*Our group selected as one of the Phase-I winners of the Healthy Behavior Data Challenge, a partnership between the Government of Canada, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and MaRS Discovery District 11/2017
*New paper on Using Sparse Digital Traces to Fill in Individual Level Mobility Timelines available on arxiv 10/2017.
*New paper on High-resolution Temporal Representations of Alcohol and Tobacco Behaviors from Social Media Data accepted for ACM CSCW 2018. Congrats Tom, Kunal and Anas!
*New NSF grant: Algorithms and Data for High-Frequency, Real-Time Anomaly Detection, with Dr. McCormick‘s group from UW! Awarded 08/2017
*Prof. Chunara invited speaker for the plenary session “Global public health threats in the 21st century” at the 15th Conference of the International Society of Travel Medicine. 05/2017
*Prof. Chunara gave an invited talk at The Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity – CRI. 03/2017
*Prof. Chunara invited keynote speaker at Joint Workshop on Health Intelligence at AAAI 2017. 02/2017
*Prof. Chunara invited attendee of CCC Discovery and Innovation in Smart and Pervasive Health Workshop. 12/2016
*Paper on “Denominator Issues for Personally-Generated Data in Population Health Monitoring” accepted (American Journal of Preventative Medicine). 10/2016
*Bisakha Ray’s work on “Predicting Acute Respiratory Infections from Participatory Data” accepted for an Oral Presentation at the 2016 International Society for Disease Surveillance conference 12/2016. Second Prize Award for Outstanding Student Abstract.
*Prof. Chunara to give an invited talk at the Federation of American Scientists 70th anniversary symposium in Washington DC 09/28/16
*New paper on Assessing Behavioral Stages From Social Media Data accepted for ACM CSCW 2017. Congratulations Jason!
*New paper on Network Inference from Multimodal data: A Review of Approaches from Infectious Disease Transmission (Journal of Biomedical Informatics). Congratulations Bisakha! 09/2016
*New NSF grant on Combining Community and Clinical Data for Augmenting Influenza Modeling with Dr. Shaman‘s group from Columbia! Awarded 09/2016
*Prof. Chunara to give an invited talk at Personalized Health in the Digital Age symposium at Campus Biotech in Switzerland September 2016
*Prof. Chunara to give an invited talk at CCS ’16 workshop on Digital Epidemiology and Surveillance September 2016
*Chunaralab undergrad researcher William Herrera accepted to the prestigious NIH Summer Internship Program in Biomedical Research.
*Nabeel Rehman will present his work on Using Propensity Score Matching to Understand the Relationship Between Online Health Information Sources and Vaccination Sentiment at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford University in March 2016.
*Prof. Chunara was an invited speaker at a panel on Web-Based Public Health Informatics at IEEE BHI ’16 in February 2016.
*Bisakha Ray presented her work on Integrating Genomic Data in a Community-based Multi-modal Viral Transmission Model for Network Inference at the NIPS Workshop on ML for Healthcare in Montreal, December 2015.