|Talks|

Graph Machine Learning and Optimization for Public Health

Visiting speaker
Virtual
Past Talk
Ajitesh Srivastava
Research Assistant Professor, USC
Mar 10, 2025
2:00 pm
Mar 10, 2025
2:00 pm
In-person
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK

Talk recording

Combining domain knowledge with AI and Network Science can enable more effective solutions to complex health challenges at various levels: within individuals (e.g., brain networks), networks of individuals, and networks of populations. While many AI/ML tools exist, off-the-shelf methods often yield suboptimal results, especially when network structures shape underlying processes. Addressing problems in health requires not just computational techniques but also an understanding of data and underlying dynamics. In this talk, I will illustrate this through two projects. The first project was a collaboration with a youth center focused on reducing violence among youth experiencing homelessness. The goal was to identify individuals to recruit in a series of mindfulness workshops who can act as peer change agents to counter overall violence in the community. We collected data on the network (who is influenced by whom) and personal attributes. We developed the "uncertain voter model" to capture the dynamics of violence and non-violence. We developed algorithms to identify the optimal set of peer leaders, taking into account the propensity for accepting intervention, a key aspect missing in prior work. Our pilot study at a youth shelter showed a significant reduction in violence and an increase in mindfulness practice. In the second project, we showed how to predict the emergence of COVID-19 variants by combining dynamics and GNNs. First, we derived the dynamics of variant prevalence across pairs of regions (countries) that apply to a large class of epidemic models. The dynamics motivated the introduction of certain features in the GNN. We demonstrated that our proposed dynamics-informed GNN outperforms all the baselines, including the currently pervasive framework of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Motivated by these projects, we will conclude the talk by highlighting new opportunities in this interdisciplinary area. We will discuss how GNNs, mechanistic models, and optimization algorithms can help address challenges in infectious diseases, mental health, substance use, and HIV-related behavior.

About the speaker
Dr. Ajitesh Srivastava is a Research Assistant Professor in Computer and Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is also an Associate Director of the USC Center for Al in Society (CAIS). His research interests include network science, algorithms, and machine learning applied to epidemics, social good, and social networks. He is a DARPA Grand Challenge Winner for forecasting the Chikungunya Virus (2014).
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Mar 10, 2025