HCII Seminar Series - Sarah Preum
Speaker
Sarah Preum
Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College and Technical Associate Director of the Dartmouth Center for Precision Health & AI
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305
Video
Panopto
Description
"From Cognitive Burden to Collaborative Intelligence: Socio-Technical AI for Clinical Communication"
Modern healthcare increasingly depends on digital communication, including patient portal messages, and telehealth platforms. While essential, such communication platforms impose a growing cognitive and emotional burden on clinicians. These “hidden” communication tasks often fragment care, reduce time with patients, and contribute to burnout. In this talk, I will share my research on developing human-centered AI systems that collaborate with patients and clinicians to ease these burdens and improve patient-provider engagement. By restoring context, communicating uncertainty, and aligning with clinical goals, these systems aim to enhance workflow efficiency, support clinician well-being, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.
Speaker's Bio
Sarah Masud Preum, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College and Technical Associate Director of the Dartmouth Center for Precision Health & AI. She leads the PersistLab, where her research sits at the intersection of natural language processing, human–AI interaction, and computational healthcare. Her work develops socio-technical AI systems that reduce communication burdens, support uncertainty-aware decision-making, and improve outcomes in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. Her research spans diverse healthcare settings, including primary care, emergency medical services, critical care, and online health communities—across both the U.S. and the Global South.
She has authored over 55 peer-reviewed publications in top venues (ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, CHI, JMIR, IMWUT, ACM Computing Surveys), and released 14 public datasets. She received recognition as a Google Research Scholar (2025), Rising Start in EECS (2020) and multiple Best Paper nominations. Her research is funded by the NIH, Google, NSF, CTSA, and various pilot grants. Sarah also contributes as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare.
Speaker's Website
Web page
Host
John Zimmerman