Amulya Yadav — Page 2

arXiv2016

Pilot Testing an Artificial Intelligence Algorithm That Selects Homeless Youth Peer Leaders Who Promote HIV Testing

Objective. To pilot test an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that selects peer change agents (PCA) to disseminate HIV testing messaging in a population of homeless youth. Methods. We recruited and assessed 62 youth at baseline, 1 month (n = 48), and 3 months (n = 38). A Facebook app collected preliminary social network data. Eleven PCAs selected by AI attended a 1-day training and 7 weekly booster sessions. Mixed-effects models with random effects were used to assess change over time. Results. Significant change over time was observed in past 6-month HIV testing (57.9%, 82.4%, 76.3%; p < .05) but not condom use (63.9%, 65.7%, 65.8%). Most youth reported speaking to a PCA about HIV prevention (72.0% at 1 month, 61.5% at 3 months). Conclusions. AI is a promising avenue for implementing PCA models for homeless youth. Increasing rates of regular HIV testing is critical to HIV prevention and linking homeless youth to treatment.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2016

Using Social Networks to Aid Homeless Shelters: Dynamic Influence Maximization under Uncertainty - An Extended Version

This paper presents HEALER, a software agent that recommends sequential intervention plans for use by homeless shelters, who organize these interventions to raise awareness about HIV among homeless youth. HEALER's sequential plans (built using knowledge of social networks of homeless youth) choose intervention participants strategically to maximize influence spread, while reasoning about uncertainties in the network. While previous work presents influence maximizing techniques to choose intervention participants, they do not address three real-world issues: (i) they completely fail to scale up to real-world sizes; (ii) they do not handle deviations in execution of intervention plans; (iii) constructing real-world social networks is an expensive process. HEALER handles these issues via four major contributions: (i) HEALER casts this influence maximization problem as a POMDP and solves it using a novel planner which scales up to previously unsolvable real-world sizes; (ii) HEALER allows shelter officials to modify its recommendations, and updates its future plans in a deviation-tolerant manner; (iii) HEALER constructs social networks of homeless youth at low cost, using a Facebook application. Finally, (iv) we show hardness results for the problem that HEALER solves. HEALER will be deployed in the real world in early Spring 2016 and is currently undergoing testing at a homeless shelter.

cs.AI↗