Epidemiologists

The promoting interdisciplinary collaboration among data scientists, epidemiologists and ethicists, AI can transition from a formidable analytical instrument to a responsible ally in public health.

An epidemiologist is a scientist who works within the field of public health. Epidemiologists collect and analyze data about the causes and frequency of diseases among specific groups of people, like residents of a certain city.

This special issue of Annals of Epidemiology solicits papers that focus on critically analyzing the uses and problems of AI in epidemiologic research, improving AI to address technical, ethical, and practical challenges in epidemiology, employing AI to effectively monitor participant health and behavior, illustrating how AI has been used in exposure, disease, or outcomes classifications, addressing the education of future epidemiologists, and furthering methods research in AI/ML.

Epidemiologists have qualitatively ... era of machine learning, deep learning, and, more broadly, artificial intelligence (AI), which emulates human intelligence using computers.1 Many epidemiologists have tried applying AI in their research....

Dissemination channels can also be diversified: AI agents can automatically generate reports for public health dashboards, push notifications for field epidemiologists, and plain language summaries for community stakeholders.

Alerts can be stratified by urgency; ... Dissemination channels can also be diversified: AI agents · can automatically generate reports for public health dash- boards, push notifications for field epidemiologists, and ·...

As the field has evolved—from John Snow{\textquoteright}s cholera investigations to large-scale cohort studies and causal inference frameworks—it now faces a transformative juncture with the advent of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML). These technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to improve data measurement, inference, and population health insights, yet also pose methodological and ethical challenges. Anchored by the core epidemiologic domains of study population, measurement, and inference, we examine how epidemiologists can use AI/ML effectively.

Abstract:AI Epidemiology is a framework for governing and explaining advanced AI systems by applying population-level surveillance methods to AI outputs. The approach mirrors the way in which epidemiologists enable public health interventions ...

The job of an epidemiologist is too dependent on analytical thinking that I believe we are quite safe from automation today, but I am not denying the fact that technology is ever growing and may someday have the ability to do the job of an epidemiologist. ... The tools will continue to be automated, but until AI can develop their own tools, interpret them, and then appropriately convey them to stakeholders and the public - this is a long shot.

Epidemiologists often use AI-based tools—sometimes without explicitly knowing it—such as Google Scholar for paper discovery, spell-checkers for writing, and GitHub Copilot for coding.