Hamsa Bastani
@hamsabastani.bsky.social
Prof @Wharton @Penn; machine learning for health & social good; foodie, gamer, homebody
An AI tool helped improve patient access to medicine in Sierra Leone, increasing the consumption of needed medicine by 19%. @hamsabastani.bsky.social chibe.upenn.edu/case-study/a...
AI tool helps get needed medicine throughout Sierra Leone - Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE)
A research team including CHIBE’s Dr. Hamsa Bastani built an AI tool that helped improve patient access to medicine in Sierra Leone.
chibe.upenn.edu
Check out new research featuring LDI Fellow @hamsabastani.bsky.social in @nature.com.⤵️
Hamsa Bastani@hamsabastani.bsky.social · 6mo agoOur years-long collaboration with Sierra Leone is out in @nature.com today! We improve allocation of essential medicines in Sierra Leone's Free Healthcare Initiative by an estimated 19% for ~2 million pregnant women and young children.
Our years-long collaboration with Sierra Leone is out in @nature.com today! We improve allocation of essential medicines in Sierra Leone's Free Healthcare Initiative by an estimated 19% for ~2 million pregnant women and young children.
AI really can help education: controlled experiment found a GPT-4o powered tutor that personalized problems for students raised final test scores by .15 SD "equivalent to as much as six to nine months of additional schooling by some estimates—without increasing instruction time or teacher workload"
🚨🚨 Excited to share our first positive results on AI in education! Most AI tutor work focuses on better chatbots. We suggest another lever: deciding what students practice next. We combine an LLM tutor with reinforcement learning to personalize problem sequencing using student-LLM interaction data.
We keep saying: "AI will handle the boring stuff, and humans will supervise." But the problem is--as AI reliability improves, it becomes really hard to motivate a human to conscientiously monitor it. In a new WP with Gerard Cachon, we describe the "human-AI contracting paradox."
Yet another example - adopting over-hyped AI/EdTech in classrooms without careful thought (especially replacing time with “trained, caring teachers”) is likely to have many negative consequences on kids' learning, motivation, and well-being https://wired.com/story/ai-teacher-inside-alpha-school/
Such a great article!! Well worth reading instead of using chatgpt to summarize 😂 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/o...
Opinion | I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.
nytimes.com
Out in @pnas.org today!! We ran a field experiment with ~1000 high school students & found: ✅ GenAI tutoring boosts practice perf ⚠️ But hinders human learning, hurting perf when AI access is removed 🛡️ Safeguards like hint-based help can offset this www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Cool paper using brain imaging to track cognitive load while writing essays! As expected, people under-use their brain when using LLM assistance, but interestingly, they also struggle more when switching back to writing on their own -- AI assistance creates "cognitive debt" arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...
arxiv.org
"Putting more screens in our classrooms is not going to automatically lead to a smarter, healthier or better-employed population. And parents of all backgrounds need to stand up and shout it now." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/o...
Opinion | A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12
nytimes.com
Conformal prediction sets are a useful way to capture uncertainty for LLMs & deep learning models. But they're data-hungry! We propose a semi-bandit algo to learn these sets online. Check out our @icmlconf.bsky.social paper: arxiv.org/abs/2405.13268 Work led by Haosen Ge, w/ @obastani.bsky.social
Stochastic Online Conformal Prediction with Semi-Bandit Feedback
Conformal prediction has emerged as an effective strategy for uncertainty quantification by modifying a model to output sets of labels instead of a single label. These prediction sets come with the gu...
arxiv.org
Great video summarizing our research! AI in education needs to be carefully designed to ensure we support critical thinking & learning W/ @obastani.bsky.social Alp Haosen Ozge Rei youtube.com/watch?v=n2W_...
How AI Vaporizes Long-Term Learning
YouTube video by Edutopia
youtube.com
Excited to once again co-organize the 4th Annual Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good at UMD on 5/2 with Margret Bjarnadottir, Jessica Clark, Jui Ramprasad, and John Silberholz! Early-career scholars, please submit your "AI for good" work by 2/14: www.rhsmith.umd.edu/departments/...
Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good | Smith School
Join us at the Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good, themed around 'Analytics for Doing Good.' Hosted by the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland on May 2, 2025, this event gat...
rhsmith.umd.edu
Excited to see our paper "Generative AI Can Harm Learning" cited in Ch 7 of the 2025 Economic Report of the President: whitehouse.gov/cea/written-... Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers...., co-authored with @obastani.bsky.social, Alp, Haosen, Ozge & Rei
The 2025 Economic Report of the President | CEA | The White House
Today, the Council of Economic Advisers under the leadership of Chair Jared Bernstein released the 2025 Economic Report of the President, the 79th report since the establishment of CEA in 1946. The 20...
whitehouse.gov