Interview with Ananya Joshi: Real-time monitoring for healthcare data

In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. Ananya Joshi recently completed her PhD, where she developed a system that experts have used for the past two years to identify respiratory outbreaks (like COVID-19) in large-scale healthcare streams across the United States using her novel algorithms for ranking real-time events from large-scale time series data. In this interview, she tells us more about this project, how healthcare applications inspire basic AI research, and her future plans. When I started my PhD during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an explosion in continuously-updated human health data. Still, it was difficult for people to figure out which data was important so that they could make decisions like increasing the number of hospital beds at the start of an outbreak or patching a serious data problem that would impact disease forecasting.