Stephen Wu, PhD joined UTHealth as an Associate Professor in August of 2018, after holding faculty positions at Mayo Clinic, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), and Addis Ababa University, and serving in a Scientist role for the tech startup Trapit, Inc.
Dr. Wu’s research interests lie in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), especially in the domain of medical language. He was the Co-PI of 2 NIH-funded research grants on these topics, and has authored over 40 peer-reviewed manuscripts. He is currently exploring how to represent meaning alongside grammar, how social networks influence textual behavior, and deep learning-based methods for these tasks. Dr. Wu is also interested in AI Ethics, particularly in non-Western settings. He has helped start a North African non-profit organization, Tibyan (“Clarifying AI”), for local research and training in AI.
Dr. Wu has taught and mentored at the graduate and undergraduate level, designing curriculum on Analyzing Sequences, NLP, and Social Network Analysis. He has developed a unique, principles-oriented approach to technical education (techied), and has adapted this philosophy to international and multicultural teaching settings.
“Medicine is a complex, multi-stakeholder environment run by real people. Imperfection is unsurprising, yet progress is expected,” says Wu. “Thus the frontier of science and medicine increasingly turns towards technology for its benefit and improvement. But simultaneously, the technological research enterprise increasingly realizes that it is itself fundamentally human, and therefore reflective of the strengths, liabilities, and biases of its people. So we live in a historic time in which humanity must walk the fine line between ignorant optimism on one side, and alarmist criticality on the other, to achieve a responsibly technology-enabled future for human health.”
Leticia Flores
Phone: 713-500-3912