UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The RAISE Lab in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, which focuses on leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to imagine a brighter future for low-resource communities around the globe, has received the 2023 Penn State Award for Community Engagement and Scholarship.
The award recognizes a project that best exemplifies Penn State as an “engaged institution,” which the Kellogg Commission defines as an institution that has redesigned teaching, research, and extension and service functions to become even more sympathetically and productively involved with its communities.
The RAISE Lab — directed by Amulya Yadav, assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology — engages Penn State students with stakeholders around the globe to build avenues for creating “responsible AI for social emancipation (or RAISE).” Members of the lab seek ways of helping underserved communities globally by solving a multitude of problems.
Those efforts include TRIM-AI, which uses AI to reduce the prevalence of maternal and neonatal mortality among pregnant women and newborn babies in Kenya. The project used algorithms that led to a real-world trial comparing TRIM-AI with traditional approaches to improve maternal and neonatal health outcomes in Kenya.
The work showed that the TRIM-AI approach is about 17% more accurate at predicting high risk medical conditions among pregnant women in Kenya, and is less than 10% of the running cost.
Critically, TRIM-AI reduced the workload of human helpdesk agents by approximately 12%, freeing up critical time for them to conduct direct phone calls for more complicated maternal cases. Since July 2022, TRIM-AI has been deployed full time in Kenya, where it has helped produce positive maternal health outcomes for two million women in the country.
“I want to emphasize the developments made by Dr. Yadav, a recognized expert in computer science,” said a nominator. “The RAISE Lab’s partnerships with rural pregnant women in Kenya has helped in improving both the accuracy and speed with which 2 million mothers in Kenya get the right care at the right time.”
RAISE Lab’s efforts are a response to recent accelerated inequality trends that have magnified the plight of the most vulnerable communities. The research lab builds long-term symbiotic collaborations with nonprofit organizations working in these marginalized communities.
These collaborations lead to more effective strategies for these nonprofit organizations. But it also leads to real-world experience for Penn State students. More than 25 undergraduate and 10 graduate students have worked in the lab that has secured more than $1.7 million in funding from organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google Research, and the Army Research Office.
“These are truly equitable and reciprocal partnerships; faculty and students at Penn State get access to real world data and problems, which enables them to advance the state-of-the-art AI tools and algorithms to advance the scholarship on community engagement,” a nominator said. “On the other hand, participating nonprofits get access to tech-based solutions.”
It’s one of several ongoing projects within the lab. Others include CLIMATES and PLAN, an AI-based forecasting tool that helps impoverished small-scale farmers in East Africa better adapt to climate change, pests and crop diseases; and WARNER, which helps spot increases in renter evictions, currently employed in Dallas, but researchers say it could be scaled nationally.