Nupoor Gandhi

Home Institution
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year Participated
2020

Year in School

REU Faculty Mentor
Cheng Xiang Zhai

Research Area Interest
Artificial Intelligence

Project Title

Biography & Research Abstract

Abstract:

The United States is more than two decades into the opioid crisis, yet the health system still struggles to discover and track dynamic and non-linear causal factors. In this work, we explore the potential of text-based social media features to discover factors related to the opioid epidemic. For this discovery task, we present a proof of concept for the construction of interpretable, discriminative embedding features. In doing so we develop a framework for using Twitter as a vehicle for discovery of novel factors related to the opioid epidemic, and public health crises in general.

Bio:

Nupoor is an incoming PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. Nupoor received her B.S. in Computer Science, with a minor in Math from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in how language can be used to understand decision-making processes in order to construct better public policy. In 2019, Nupoor was a Research Fellow for the Data Science for Social Good Program at Imperial College London. At Illinois, Nupoor has studied prediction for public health outcomes using social media data in the Text Information Group (TIMAN) and Social Action Lab.