Jie Tao, DSc, is an associate professor of business analytics and the director of the AI and Technology Institute in the Charles F. Dolan School of Business. His research studies the detection of suicidal ideation in social media through artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
Through the research model KETCH: “A Knowledge-Enhanced Transformer-Based Approach to Suicidal Ideation Detection from Social Media Content,” Dr. Tao and his team trained large language models (LLM’s) on a vast number of texts. Ultimately, the process integrated human expertise into AI models and, according to the business analytics professor, “the model [was] adopted by psychiatrists and counselors in the field, and it did improve their efficiency in following up with users at suicidal ideation (SI) risk.”
Over the course of more than five years, Dr. Tao and his research colleagues collected their longitude data to build the prototype by looking at multi-cultural social media platforms such as Reddit, X, and Sina Weibo (a blogging website in China). The team then implemented a real-world prototype in China, scaling the work of what would have previously taken 18 mental health experts into a single curated AI-augmented system, largely boosting their detection accuracy and intervention efficiency.
