Karishma and Pratush Muthukumar take advantage of each other’s strengths. Over the years, the UCI alumni have worked as a tag team on many projects, leveraging their respective expertise in cognitive and computer science. Their current project is developing an empathic chatbot for use in the medical field.
“There is a lot of talk about ChatGPT and similar language models coming out at this time, and we wanted to equip a chatbot that was specifically designed to consider empathy and sympathy in their responses. ‘ said Pratush Muthukumar, the younger of the two. “Patients struggling with depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems may be able to converse with empathetic chatbots.”
He and his sister both graduated from UCI in 2022, with Prachush with a degree in Computer Science and Karishma with a degree in Cognitive Science.
She was invited by the United Nations to speak at the 2020 AI for Good Global Summit, which was postponed for several years due to the pandemic. When the organizers reached out again in 2022, she offered to co-speak with her brother about her recent studies at the UCI. Finally, the Southern Californian duo will be heading to Europe in July to give a presentation on emotion-driven AI at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland.
First encounter with AI
Karishma Muthukumar’s interest in artificial intelligence and its medical applications first began in 2014 when she joined Sharon Disney Lund Children’s Hospital in Orange County. Institute of Medical Information, Research and Innovation. Here she learned about AI for the first time, especially in the field of healthcare. Soon, Karishmam Thukumar was just 15 years old, and at the International Pediatric Innovation Society’s annual Peds 2040 conference, she became the youngest person to win the Best Abstract Award in the field of AI. In 2018, she was named a “Young Innovator to Watch” at Consumer Electronics Show for her medical innovation integrating emoji and AI to help paralyzed patients communicate.
During her tenure at UCI, Karishma Muthukumar won a prestigious civil service scholarship from the Donald A. Strauss Foundation through which she founded a patient project. The organization promotes conversational care between caregivers, patients and relatives in hospital waiting rooms and nursing homes.
She sees her brother’s work on empathic conversational AI as an extension of their work at UCI.
“We actually took a computational biology class together and that summed up this move. I thought it was really cool to be in the same class as him,” she says. “I think this shows that similar dynamics are important for artificial intelligence.”
Pratush Muthukumar shares his sister’s belief in the value of taking an interdisciplinary approach. He points out that it is difficult to predict what will happen with AI because it is an evolving field.
“I think open source language models are trending toward public availability now,” he says. “In the future, we hope to see much greater explainability and transparency, allowing us all to understand the thought process behind how these models are created. I hope empathy and compassion are included as major aspects behind the rationale.”
Pratush Muthukumar completed his undergraduate studies at the UCI last year at the age of 18. Currently, he is at Stanford University, completing his Master of Science in Computer Science with a specialization in AI, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. During his undergraduate studies, Barry won a Goldwater Research Fellowship and conducted a project to generate empathy-based AI using generative adversarial imitation learning.
“Currently, AI is moving towards connecting humans, and there is more interaction between humans and AI. I think so,” he says.
AI forever
Muthukumars’ empathy-based chatbot is the embodiment of AI forever. UCI continues to contribute to its growth, with the brothers working on deep learning models alongside Pramod Hargonekar, Vice Chancellor for Research, and Deepan Muthilayan, Postdoctoral Fellow in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. As such technologies evolve, Karishma Muthukumar says there is an urgent need to understand the impact of AI on society, and the real-world impact that society has on AI.
“I think it’s very useful to have a conversation around AI and think about what elements we want to incorporate as a society. I think a lot about this question, how can we influence ,” she says. . “If you think about it, we started in the analog world, then moved to the digital world, and now we are moving to the AI world. Is it? It’s something we think and decide collectively as a society.”
To learn more about supporting this and other causes at UCI, please visit the Brilliant Future website. https://brilliantfuture.uci.edu. The Brilliant Future campaign, launched to the public on October 4, 2019, aims to raise awareness and support for the UCI. By participating with 75,000 alumni, With $2 billion in philanthropic investment, UCI strives to reach new heights of excellence in student success, health, research and more..
