UMAICS: Harnessing Data Science to Improve the Social Good, featuring Wei Ai
Using machine learning techniques to influence positive behavior.
University of Maryland iSchool Assistant Professor Wei Ai was featured in the UMIACS article, “Harnessing Data Science to Improve the Social Good” written by Maria Herd.
Dr. Ai is using machine learning techniques to promote positive behavioral changes in society. His research aims to influence people to donate more money to charities, live healthier lifestyles, and participate in open source platforms.
To conduct his research, Dr. Ai uses casual inference, builds recommender systems, and does field experiments to verify his approaches.
Since starting at UMD around the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic hitting, Dr. Ai has been focused on improving education.
“What approaches could we use to keep students more engaged?” Ai asks. “It could be teams or something else, but the current setting gives us an opportunity to think about new ways to improve student success.”