October 13, 2017
Ching-Hua Chen, PhD
Manager
Computational Health Behavior & Decision Science
IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center
About the Presentation: The mission of the Computational Health Behavior & Decision Science group at IBM Research is to use computational methods to recognize behaviors from data, compare alternative behavioral interventions and deliver data-driven insights to individuals to support behavior modification for better health outcomes. Their projects leverage data ranging from clinical, workplace and community settings, and they leverage both qualitative and quantitative methods. In this talk, Dr. Chen will describe select research efforts, including their efforts to leverage physiological measurements for supporting precision stress management, as well as our efforts to provide enhanced decision support to users of fitness tracking devices. Dr. Chen will also include some reflections on the challenges and opportunities associated with conducting interdisciplinary research in an industrial setting.
About the Presenter: Dr. Chen leads an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, data scientists and medical researchers, whose goal is to develop and test technology-enabled approaches to studying health behavior and patient decision-making. They want to use technology to increase the speed, breadth and accuracy with which practitioners can identify interventions for health behavior modification. They also want to improve their ability to quantify health behavior and patient experience through the analysis of various types of temporal data (e.g., from medical/health records, social platforms, wearable devices, IoT sensors).
Dr. Chen graduated from the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University, with a dual-title Ph.D. in business administration and operations research. Her expertise is in combining various forms of “analytics” (e.g., predictive modeling, statistical forecasting, optimization, simulation) and applying them to applications in business (e.g., supply chain management, health care management, traffic management). She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing from the University of Alabama, Birmingham.