Angel T-H Chung

PhD student @Wharton @Penn | formerly @PennGSE | Interested in equitable AI & ML for health, edu, social good | 🎺🎵⚾️🏓️

[Tony Fadell @tfadell]

Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote about "learning by doing" decades ago. He knew that productivity and expertise improve through experience.

The messy, repetitive works is often where you learn the patterns that eventually become judgment. Knowledge can be taught, but judgement is built through lived experience.

The first draft you rewrite. The customer call you listen to. The bug you fix and fix again. The factory floor you walk.

Small decisions you make every day teach you judgement. And, judgement is the thing everyone wants from senior people in the workplace. If we automate away every entry-level task without replacing the learning loop, we are removing a part of the process that creates experts.

The goal should be to use AI to accelerate learning, remove friction, and give people better tools to build expertise faster.

https://t.co/MpFZzCk1An

Thanks @Fortune & @tbove4 for sharing this story. Link in the comments.

[Ziad Obermeyer @oziadias]

Places to look for ambitious, creative, rigorous health AI:

Sierra Leone, Thailand, Rwanda.

A short comment in @Nature https://t.co/ImpMDj64w7

Don't miss the main course: amazing new paper by @AngelTHChung
@obastani @hamsabastani

[Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani]

Our years-long collaboration with Sierra Leone is out in @Nature 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. To achieve this, we deployed a computationally tractable "decision-aware" forecasting + stochastic optimization pipeline at scale -- a topic of considerable recent interest in the OR/CS communities.

This project has been an incredibly long and challenging path to fruition, made possibly only by @AngelTHChung's tireless efforts, @obastani's brilliance and the support of our coauthors in the Sierra Leone administration. None of us worked on this primarily to write a research paper, so this was an extra happy outcome.

This work was generously supported by @WhartonAIAI, @Wharton Mack Institute for Innovation Management & Global Initiatives.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

The research team (including @hamsabastani who is on X) found that letting students just use AI resulted in them using it to accidentally shortcut learning

But both that study and a separate RCT found that AIs prompted to act as a tutor improved learning https://t.co/0HtjGC8eU0

[Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani]

🚨🚨 Excited to share our first *positive* results on AI in education!

Most AI tutor work focuses on making the chatbot better. We suggest another lever: deciding what students should practice next to improve learning.

We combine an LLM tutor with reinforcement learning to personalize problem sequencing using signals from student-chatbot interactions and solution attempts.

We tested this in a 5-month randomized field experiment in a Python course across 10 high schools in Taipei. All students had the same course material and the same AI tutor. The only difference was adaptive vs. fixed problem sequencing.

Result: across 770 students, adaptive sequencing improved performance on an in-person final exam taken without AI assistance by 0.15 SD, with larger effects for beginners. Our evidence suggests the gains came from stronger engagement and more productive AI use.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

AI really can help education: Randomized controlled experiment on high school students 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"

[Angel T-H Chung @AngelTHChung]

Apply here: https://t.co/FrckQCdEIb

[Angel T-H Chung @AngelTHChung]

Scholarship opportunity for PhD applicants in OM!

https://t.co/r7LLtuOiMB

[Angel T-H Chung @AngelTHChung]

Excited to share our work w/ @hamsabastani and @obastani as my debut post at X!

[Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative @WhartonAIAI]

Learn how @Wharton PhD student, @AngelTHChung, leveraged machine learning to help the government of Sierra Leone distribute limited medical aid to the communities who need it most, as we continue to highlight Wharton Women in Analytics.
https://t.co/FetlwQ4WC6

[Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani]

Check out the awesome work @AngelTHChung has been doing to improve health supply chains in Sierra Leone! Recent deployment improved patient access to essential meds by ~20%!