PSINET: Assisting HIV Prevention Amongst Homeless Youth by Planning Ahead
Homeless youth are prone to Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) due to their engagement in high risk behavior such as unprotected sex, sex under influence of drugs, etc. Many non-profit agencies conduct interventions to educate and train a select group of homeless youth about HIV prevention and treatment practices and rely on word-of-mouth spread of information through their social network. Previous work in strategic selection of intervention participants does not handle uncertainties in the social network's structure and evolving network state, potentially causing significant shortcomings in spread of information. Thus, we developed PSINET, a decision support system to aid the agencies in this task. PSINET includes the following key novelties: (i) it handles uncertainties in network structure and evolving network state; (ii) it addresses these uncertainties by using POMDPs in influence maximization; and (iii) it provides algorithmic advances to allow high quality approximate solutions for such POMDPs. Simulations show that PSINET achieves 60% more information spread over the current state-of-the-art. PSINET was developed in collaboration with My Friend's Place (a drop-in agency serving homeless youth in Los Angeles) and is currently being reviewed by their officials.
A biomedical open knowledge network harnesses the power of AI to understand deep human biology
Knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R) has been successfully implemented in many fields to enable computers to solve complex problems with AI methods. However, its application to biomedicine has been lagging in part due to the daunting complexity of molecular and cellular pathways that govern human physiology and pathology. In this article we describe concrete uses of SPOKE, an open knowledge network that connects curated information from 37 specialized and human-curated databases into a single property graph, with 3 million nodes and 15 million edges to date. Applications discussed in this article include drug discovery, COVID-19 research and chronic disease diagnosis and management.