Events

Date: 19 November 2025   Time: 11:00 - 12:00

Location: Peter Landin 4.01, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. Also online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87814683344?pwd=g5NaIKOvZ0NyzWafij...

Effective and compassionate communication with patients is becoming central to healthcare, and Natural Language Processing can play a central role in this endeavor. I will discuss the results of and lessons learned from two ongoing projects in this space, but also address the problem of bias in our computational models, especially LLMs. The VIRTUAL-COACH project models health coaching interactions via text exchanges that encourage patients to adopt specific and realistic physical activity goals; the HFChat project envisions an always-on-call conversational assistant for heart failure patients, that they can ask for information about lifestyle issues such as food and exercise. In the HFChat project, we directly compared an in-house conversational interface with one based on ChatGPT. This will bring me to the third part of the talk, in which I will discuss our study of bias in LLMs applied to healthcare.

All our work is characterized by: large interdisciplinary groups of investigators who bring different perspectives to the research; grounding computational models in ecologically valid data, which is small by its own nature; and a focus on culturally appropriate interventions and on the ethical concerns of deploying such applications.

Barbara Di Eugenio is the Warren S. McCulloch Collegiate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago (USA). There she leads the NLP laboratory (nlp.cs.uic.edu/). She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1993). Her research has always focused on the pragmatics and computational modeling of discourse and dialogue, grounded in authentic data collection on the one hand, and in user studies on the other. The applications of her work run the gamut from educational technology to human-robot interaction, from data visualization to healthcare. Dr. Di Eugenio is an NSF CAREER awardee (2002); a UIC University Scholar (2018-2020); a Zenith Award recipient from AWIS, the Association for Women in Science (2022); and an Association of Computational Linguistics Fellow (2023). She was the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Discourse and Dialogue 2019-2025. She is very proud to have graduated 18 PhD and 32 Master's students.