Deep Learning Methods for Public Health Prediction

Abstract:
Epidemic prediction is an essential tool for public health decision-making and strategic planning. Despite its importance, our ability to model the spread of epidemics remains limited, largely due to the complexity of social and pathogen dynamics. With the increasing availability of real-time multimodal data and advances in deep learning, a new opportunity has emerged to capture and exploit previously unobservable facets of the spatiotemporal dynamics of epidemics. Toward realizing the potential of AI in public health, my work addresses multiple challenges in this domain, such as data scarcity, distributional changes, and issues arising from real-time deployment to support the CDC’s COVID-19 and influenza responses. This talk will provide an overview of our developments to address these challenges, including novel deep learning architectures for real-time response to disease outbreaks, new techniques for end-to-end learning with mechanistic epidemiological models, and methods for uncertainty quantification and robustness to distribution shifts.

Biography:
Alexander Rodríguez is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his PhD in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2023. His research interests include problems at the intersection of machine learning, time series, multi-agent systems, uncertainty quantification, and scientific modeling. These are primarily motivated by public health, computational epidemiology, and community resilience. His work has been recognized with the best paper award at ICML AI4ABM 2022 and was awarded the 1st place in the Facebook/CMU COVID-19 Challenge and the 2nd place in the C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge. He was also named a ‘Rising Star in Data Science’ by the University of Chicago Data Science Institute in 2021 and a ‘Rising Star in ML & AI’ by the University of Southern California in 2022. His dissertation received the 2024 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and the 2024 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Runner Up. His homepage is alrodri.engin.umich.edu.