Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and the College of Computing have announced the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) fellowship for students and faculty at the University of Liberia. These fellowships cover full tuition for the degree program.

“We are pleased to be able to offer this fellowship program to the people of Liberia,” said Steven McLaughlin, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “The value of a Georgia Tech degree is well-documented and programs such as this one help us deliver on our commitment to empower people of all backgrounds and stages of life to learn and contribute to technological and human progress.”

Michael Best, executive director of IPaT, made the announcement during a luncheon hosted at Georgia Tech on May 11. Joseph N. Boakai, the 26th president of the Republic of Liberia, attended along with a Liberian delegation and representatives from the University Consortium for Liberia (UCL). The UCL provides scholarships, facilitates student exchange programs, study abroad opportunities, and service-learning initiatives between Liberia and partner organizations worldwide. This was President Boakai’s first official visit to the U.S. since becoming president in January.

“Education is the key to building a successful nation, and Georgia Tech is making great research and academic contributions to the Republic of Liberia and to the world,” said President Boakai. “The OMSCS fellowship program will provide the people of Liberia with an additional opportunity to benefit from this relationship and help advance our country.”

The OMSCS program, where coursework is done asynchronously, is one of Tech’s most successful global degree programs and is designed for students seeking a top-ranked degree with the flexibility to fit their studies around work and family commitments.

The purpose of the president’s visit was to thank assembled UCL members for their partnership in Liberia’s post-conflict development. In addition to Georgia Tech leadership, UCL members from Clark Atlanta University, Kennesaw State University, Fort Valley State University, Savannah State University, and the University of Georgia were also in attendance, along with Cynthia Blandford, UCL president.

Best, who also serves as a professor with Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and School of Interactive Computing, has a longstanding relationship with Liberia. His involvement began in 2005, just two years after the end of their civil war. His research focuses on information and communication technologies for social, economic, and political advancement. In Liberia, he has partnered in the development of their national information and communications technology and telecommunications policy, created and deployed technology-focused workforce development programs, outfitted computer facilities for public sector units, helped found the iLab Liberia technology and innovation hub, and developed novel digital systems to support that country’s post-conflict healing and reconciliation.

“President Boakai’s visit to Georgia Tech, just four months into his administration, underscores our deep ties and lasting partnership,” said Best. “These new OMSCS fellowships were received with remarkable enthusiasm, demonstrating that the relationship between the Republic of Liberia and Georgia Tech continues to flourish.”

Seven students were hired for the 2024 summer research internship program created by the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) in 2021. The summer program is an opportunity for students looking to gain real-world experience related to research and community engagement. For 2024, the internship program duration is 12 weeks (May 13th to August 2nd). All Georgia Tech students were invited to apply. This year’s summer interns will receive up to $7,000 for a full-time internship paid bi-weekly.

The seven selected Georgia Tech students for IPaT’s 2024 summer research internship program, their projects, and their research mentors are:

• Sameer Arora, sophomore majoring in computer science, who will work with Peter Presti, senior research scientist, on the prolonged exposure therapy iOS mobile app.
• Siddharth Jain, undergraduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
• Seongjin Kim, sophomore majoring in electrical engineering, who will work with Celeste Mason, research scientist, on a passive haptic learning and rehabilitation project.
• Nathan Lin, senior majoring in computational media, who will work with Peter Presti and Brian Jones, principal research scientist, on the Aware Home smart bathroom project.
• Grace Littler, undergraduate majoring in architecture, who will work with Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab. The SimTigrate Design Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab using evidence-based design to improve the medical experience for patients and providers.
• Matthew Perry, junior majoring in computer engineering, will work with the Aware Home researching gait speed and the smart bathroom.
• Shreya Sasmal, junior majoring in computational media, who will be working with Kala Jordan, research scientist, and Maribeth Coleman, director of research for IPaT, on an augmented reality/artificial intelligence project. 

Get comfortable traveling by bike with this instructional group ride! This in-person class is offered by Parking and Transportation Services in collaboration with Propel ATL and is designed specifically for members of the Georgia Tech community — that includes students, staff, and faculty!

What to expect

We will gather BEHIND the Campus Recreation Center on Tech Parkway. Here, we will perform a few quick drills then hit the city or campus streets for a 45-minute ride of three to four gentle miles. Once rolling, we’ll

• Take it slow, stay together, and practice our skills in a safe and supportive manner
• Experience Atlanta’s existing bicycle facilities, like two-directional protected and/or single-directional bike lanes and sharrows, and
• Learn to ride safely on streets without bike lanes by exercising our legal right to “take the lane.”

How to prepare

Please bring a helmet and a bicycle in good repair that fits you. We strongly recommend that you also bring:

• Water and sunscreen
• Sneakers or other appropriate closed-toed shoes
• Comfortable, appropriate clothing for being outside and active
• A friend or three!

Please arrive promptly so all participants can benefit from the full time allotted for this instructional experience. In case of rain, this class will be rescheduled.

These free classes are provided with the support of the Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety.

Sign up today!

The call from his mom is still vivid 20 years later. Moments this big and this devastating can define lives, and for Hong Yeo, today a Georgia Tech mechanical engineer, this call certainly did. Yeo was a 21-year-old in college studying car design when his mom called to tell him his father had died in his sleep. A heart attack claimed the life of the 49-year-old high school English teacher who had no history of heart trouble and no signs of his growing health threat. For the family, it was a crushing blow that altered each of their paths.

“It was an uncertain time for all of us,” said Yeo. “This loss changed my focus.”

For Yeo, thoughts and dreams of designing cars for Hyundai in Korea turned instead toward medicine. The shock of his father going from no signs of illness to gone forever developed into a quest for medical answers that might keep other families from experiencing the pain and loss his family did — or at least making it less likely to happen.  

Yeo’s own research and schooling in college pointed out a big problem when it comes to issues with sleep and how our bodies’ systems perform — data. He became determined to invent a way to give medical doctors better information that would allow them to spot a problem like his father’s before it became life-threatening.

His answer: a type of wearable sleep data system. Now very close to being commercially available, Yeo’s device comes after years of working on the materials and electronics for an easy-to-wear, comfortable mask that can gather data about sleep over multiple days or even weeks, allowing doctors to catch sporadic heart problems or other issues. Different from some of the bulky devices with straps and cords currently available for at-home heart monitoring, it offers the bonuses of ease of use and comfort, ensuring little to no alteration to users’ bedtime routine or wear. This means researchers can collect data from sleep patterns that are as close to normal sleep as possible.  

“Most of the time now, gathering sleep data means the patient must come to a lab or hospital for sleep monitoring. Of course, it’s less comfortable than home, and the devices patients must wear make it even less so. Also, the process is expensive, so it’s rare to get multiple nights of data,” says Audrey Duarte, University of Texas human memory researcher.  

Duarte has been working with Yeo on this system for more than 10 years. She says there are so many mental and physical health outcomes tied to sleep that good, long-term data has the potential to have tremendous impact.

“The results we’ve seen are incredibly encouraging, related to many things —from heart issues to areas I study more closely like memory and Alzheimer’s,” said Duarte.

Yeo’s device may not have caught the arrhythmia that caused his father’s heart attack, but nights or weeks of data would have made effective medical intervention much more likely.  

Inspired by his own family’s loss, Yeo’s life’s work has become a tool of hope for others.  

Georgia Tech researchers say non-English speakers shouldn’t rely on chatbots like ChatGPT to provide valuable healthcare advice. 

A team of researchers from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has developed a framework for assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

Ph.D. students Mohit Chandra and Yiqiao (Ahren) Jin are the co-lead authors of the paper Better to Ask in English: Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Healthcare Queries. 

Their paper’s findings reveal a gap between LLMs and their ability to answer health-related questions. Chandra and Jin point out the limitations of LLMs for users and developers but also highlight their potential. 

Their XLingEval framework cautions non-English speakers from using chatbots as alternatives to doctors for advice. However, models can improve by deepening the data pool with multilingual source material such as their proposed XLingHealth benchmark.     

“For users, our research supports what ChatGPT’s website already states: chatbots make a lot of mistakes, so we should not rely on them for critical decision-making or for information that requires high accuracy,” Jin said.   

“Since we observed this language disparity in their performance, LLM developers should focus on improving accuracy, correctness, consistency, and reliability in other languages,” Jin said. 

Using XLingEval, the researchers found chatbots are less accurate in Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi compared to English. By focusing on correctness, consistency, and verifiability, they discovered: 

• Correctness decreased by 18% when the same questions were asked in Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi. 
• Answers in non-English were 29% less consistent than their English counterparts. 
• Non-English responses were 13% overall less verifiable. 

XLingHealth contains question-answer pairs that chatbots can reference, which the group hopes will spark improvement within LLMs.  

The HealthQA dataset uses specialized healthcare articles from the popular healthcare website Patient. It includes 1,134 health-related question-answer pairs as excerpts from original articles.  

LiveQA is a second dataset containing 246 question-answer pairs constructed from frequently asked questions (FAQs) platforms associated with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).  

For drug-related questions, the group built a MedicationQA component. This dataset contains 690 questions extracted from anonymous consumer queries submitted to MedlinePlus. The answers are sourced from medical references, such as MedlinePlus and DailyMed.   

In their tests, the researchers asked over 2,000 medical-related questions to ChatGPT-3.5 and MedAlpaca. MedAlpaca is a healthcare question-answer chatbot trained in medical literature. Yet, more than 67% of its responses to non-English questions were irrelevant or contradictory.  

“We see far worse performance in the case of MedAlpaca than ChatGPT,” Chandra said. 

“The majority of the data for MedAlpaca is in English, so it struggled to answer queries in non-English languages. GPT also struggled, but it performed much better than MedAlpaca because it had some sort of training data in other languages.” 

Ph.D. student Gaurav Verma and postdoctoral researcher Yibo Hu co-authored the paper. 

Jin and Verma study under Srijan Kumar, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, and Hu is a postdoc in Kumar’s lab. Chandra is advised by Munmun De Choudhury, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing. 
 
The team will present their paper at The Web Conference, occurring May 13-17 in Singapore. The annual conference focuses on the future direction of the internet. The group’s presentation is a complimentary match, considering the conference's location.  

English and Chinese are the most common languages in Singapore. The group tested Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi because they are the world’s most spoken languages after English. Personal curiosity and background played a part in inspiring the study. 

“ChatGPT was very popular when it launched in 2022, especially for us computer science students who are always exploring new technology,” said Jin. “Non-native English speakers, like Mohit and I, noticed early on that chatbots underperformed in our native languages.” 

School of Interactive Computing communications officer Nathan Deen and School of Computational Science and Engineering communications officer Bryant Wine contributed to this report.