Best of CASE District II Award
 

Institution: Johns Hopkins University

Title of entry: AI in Public Health

About this entry: ChatGPT emerged in late 2022 and demonstrated the transformative power of artificial intelligence, but a different revelation captivated the Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health magazine team a few months later: We learned that every one of the School’s 10 departments was working on at least one AI-driven project. We moved quickly to document this dramatic shift in a package of articles that reveal the new ways public health and the School’s research gets done—and how this will ultimately matter to everyday people.

We built a special section that describes faculty’s experimentation and engagement with AI, from sifting community-surveillance data to identify people at risk of suicide, to analyzing a person’s gait for changes linked to the progression of neurological diseases, to rooting out racism and other biases baked into AI algorithms.

We used different types of stories—an essay, longform journalism, shorter feature articles, and a history—to help readers understand what’s at stake. The series opens with a first-person essay that combines real-world examples of what AI can do, along with a call for ethical and responsible control of its power. We move next to a journalistic piece demonstrating the need for guard rails, to a deeply reported story of what can go wrong if AI isn’t constrained by human judgment, to a history that puts this all in context, and, finally, to a survey of research that is already harnessing AI’s power to improve human health.