Emma Pierson 2023 Early Career Fellow
Affiliation Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley Hard Problem Solved for access, participation, and agency in the development of AI and the growth of its ecosystem and its beneficial use for countries, companies, organizations, and segments of society and people, especially those not involved in the development of AI.

Emma Pierson is an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and core faculty in the Computational Precision Health program. She develops data science and machine learning methods to study inequality and healthcare. Her work has been recognized by best paper, poster, and talk awards, an NSF CAREER award, a Rhodes Scholarship, Hertz Fellowship, Rising Star in EECS, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science, AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, and Samsung AI Researcher of the Year. Her research has been published in venues including Nature, JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, PNAS, Nature Medicine, ICML and ICLR, and she has also written for The New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, Wired, and various other publications.

AI2050 Project

As large language models like ChatGPT become increasingly pervasive, the question of how we can use them to increase, as opposed to reduce, social equity becomes ever more pressing. Emma Pierson’s AI2050 project explores how large language models can be used to improve health equity by both cataloging and studying specific use cases.

Project Artifacts

A. Zink, Z. Obermeyer, E. Pierson. Race adjustments in clinical algorithms can help correct for racial disparities in data quality. PNAS. 2024.

R. Movva, P.W. Koh, E. Pierson. Annotation alignment: Comparing LLM and human annotations of conversational safety. arXiv. 2024.