Emma Pierson is an assistant professor of computer science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, and a computer science field member at Cornell University. She holds a secondary joint appointment as an Assistant Professor of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College. 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, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science. Her research has been published at venues including ICML, KDD, WWW, Nature, and Nature Medicine, 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.