The problem
Amidst a virulent pandemic and an austere economic climate, stress, fear and worry have pervaded many of our minds. It is more important than ever to promote mental well-being.
What we did
I am currently working in the Fluid Interfaces group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on interpretable closed-loop digital behavior change interventions. We performed ablation studies to both rigorously compare different sequence to sequence models such as Transformers to represent digital behavior of individuals, and evaluate exploration strategies to determine optimal Reinforcement Learning based interventions. In order to provide personalized context-aware interventions using minimal data, we assessed the applicability of Contextual Bandits augmented with guided exploration. From conducting user interviews to engineering and testing our own models and simulated environments, working in a multi-disciplinary lab taught me that most problems are not contained in a single field.