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Hamsa Bastani

@hamsabastani.bsky.social
403 followers 51 following 31 posts

Prof @Wharton @Penn; machine learning for health & social good; foodie, gamer, homebody

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Reposted by Hamsa Bastani
Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics @pennchibe.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
An AI tool helped improve patient access to medicine in Sierra Leone, increasing the consumption of needed medicine by 19%. @hamsabastani.bsky.social chibe.upenn.edu/case-study/a...
chibe.upenn.edu
AI tool helps get needed medicine throughout Sierra Leone - Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE)
A research team including CHIBE’s Dr. Hamsa Bastani built an AI tool that helped improve patient access to medicine in Sierra Leone.
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Reposted by Hamsa Bastani
Penn LDI @pennldi.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Check out new research featuring LDI Fellow @hamsabastani.bsky.social in @nature.com.⤵️
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
This work was generously supported by the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative, the Wharton Mack Institute for Innovation Management & Wharton Global Initiatives.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
This project has been an incredibly long and challenging path to fruition, made possibly only by Angel's tireless efforts, @obastani.bsky.social's brilliance and the support of our coauthors in the Sierra Leone administration. None of us worked on this to write a paper, so this was a happy outcome.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
To achieve this, we deployed a computationally tractable "decision-aware" forecasting + stochastic optimization pipeline at scale -- a topic of considerable recent interest in the OR/CS communities.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Our years-long collaboration with Sierra Leone is out in @nature.com today! We improve allocation of essential medicines in Sierra Leone's Free Healthcare Initiative by an estimated 19% for ~2 million pregnant women and young children.
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Reposted by Hamsa Bastani
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
Effective Personalized AI Tutors via LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning
<div> Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping education by unlocking the potential for personalized tutoring. Yet, emerging platforms largely focus on GenAI
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Reposted by Hamsa Bastani
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
AI really can help education: controlled experiment found a GPT-4o powered tutor that personalized problems for students raised final test scores by .15 SD "equivalent to as much as six to nine months of additional schooling by some estimates—without increasing instruction time or teacher workload"
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
This work was led by Angel Chung, and joint work with Botong Zhang, Ling-Chieh Kung, & @obastani.bsky.social . We are grateful for generous funding from the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative, Mack Institute, Amazon Research, the Taipei City Government, and the American Institute in Taiwan.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Unlike our earlier work where AI assistance harmed learning by substituting for productive struggle (tinyurl.com/5fa9kvvb & tinyurl.com/mphttkuf), this system *created* productive struggle by matching students to problems of appropriate difficulty. Design matters!
tinyurl.com
Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics | PNAS
Generative AI is poised to revolutionize how humans work, and has already demonstrated promise in significantly improving human productivity. A key...
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Result: across 770 students, adaptive sequencing improved performance on an in-person final exam taken without AI assistance by 0.15 SD, with larger effects for beginners. Our evidence suggests the gains came from stronger engagement and more productive AI use.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
We tested this in a 5-month randomized field experiment in a Python course across 10 high schools in Taipei. All students had the same course material/instruction and the same AI tutor. The only difference was adaptive vs. fixed problem sequencing.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
🚨🚨 Excited to share our first positive results on AI in education! Most AI tutor work focuses on better chatbots. We suggest another lever: deciding what students practice next. We combine an LLM tutor with reinforcement learning to personalize problem sequencing using student-LLM interaction data.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
This work was led by Angel Chung, and joint work with Botong Zhang, Ling-Chieh Kung, & @obastani.bsky.social. We are grateful for generous funding from the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative, Mack Institute, Amazon Research, the Taipei City Government, and the American Institute in Taiwan.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
When we fit a sigmoid (S-curve) to the exact same dataset by @metr.org, we find it fits the data much better (in-sample) than their exponential, suggesting a compelling alternative. Importantly, the inflection point (June 2025) has already passed.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Great example! I agree autonomous driving suffers the exact same issue
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Interesting and definitely related, thank you for sharing!
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Barriers to AI adoption isn’t just about technological trust—addressing the economics of attention will be key to achieving human-AI collaboration. Read the full paper here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
The Human-AI Contracting Paradox
The integration of state-of-the-art AI tools into professional workflows promises substantial productivity gains. Rather than replacing workers, there is hope t
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
This creates a perverse incentive where employers will: 🚫 Ban the AI entirely to avoid unmonitored risks, 👋 Fire the human, even when human oversight would have improved outcomes, or 📉 Adopt a less reliable AI tool, simply because it keeps the human engaged at a lower cost.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
If the AI is right 99% of the time, the human-in-the-loop has almost zero incentive to inspect the outputs. To force them to stay vigilant against that rare mistake, the employer has to pay a massive wage premium—one that scales inversely with the error probability.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
We keep saying: "AI will handle the boring stuff, and humans will supervise." But the problem is--as AI reliability improves, it becomes really hard to motivate a human to conscientiously monitor it. In a new WP with Gerard Cachon, we describe the "human-AI contracting paradox."
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
This is not to say AI can't improve education, but it requires careful measurement, experimentation, and evaluation - none of which is happening. The tech industry has put FAR more effort into A/B testing for ad optimization than into building for education.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
Yet another example - adopting over-hyped AI/EdTech in classrooms without careful thought (especially replacing time with “trained, caring teachers”) is likely to have many negative consequences on kids' learning, motivation, and well-being ⁦https://wired.com/story/ai-teacher-inside-alpha-school/
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Such a great article!! Well worth reading instead of using chatgpt to summarize 😂 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Thanks!! P.s. just so you know, you're the only reason I post on bluesky 😂
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Joint work w/ amazing team @obastani.bsky.social, Alp Süngü, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı, & Rei Mariman. Grateful for thoughtful feedback from Eric Bradlow, Angela Duckworth, Stefan Feuerriegel, Benjamin Lira Luttges, Lilach M., Ananya Sen, Christian Terwiesch, Lyle Ungar, & many others
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Out in @pnas.org today!! We ran a field experiment with ~1000 high school students & found: ✅ GenAI tutoring boosts practice perf ⚠️ But hinders human learning, hurting perf when AI access is removed 🛡️ Safeguards like hint-based help can offset this www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
Cool paper using brain imaging to track cognitive load while writing essays! As expected, people under-use their brain when using LLM assistance, but interestingly, they also struggle more when switching back to writing on their own -- AI assistance creates "cognitive debt" arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
arxiv.org
Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
Research increasingly shows that AI without appropriate guardrails can harm students' long-term learning and engagement. This is not something to be rushed into without careful experimentation and resources, especially when it comes to our young kids.
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
"Putting more screens in our classrooms is not going to automatically lead to a smarter, healthier or better-employed population. And parents of all backgrounds need to stand up and shout it now." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Conformal prediction sets are a useful way to capture uncertainty for LLMs & deep learning models. But they're data-hungry! We propose a semi-bandit algo to learn these sets online. Check out our @icmlconf.bsky.social paper: arxiv.org/abs/2405.13268 Work led by Haosen Ge, w/ @obastani.bsky.social
arxiv.org
Stochastic Online Conformal Prediction with Semi-Bandit Feedback
Conformal prediction has emerged as an effective strategy for uncertainty quantification by modifying a model to output sets of labels instead of a single label. These prediction sets come with the gu...
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Great video summarizing our research! AI in education needs to be carefully designed to ensure we support critical thinking & learning W/ @obastani.bsky.social Alp Haosen Ozge Rei youtube.com/watch?v=n2W_...
youtube.com
How AI Vaporizes Long-Term Learning
YouTube video by Edutopia
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Excited to once again co-organize the 4th Annual Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good at UMD on 5/2 with Margret Bjarnadottir, Jessica Clark, Jui Ramprasad, and John Silberholz! Early-career scholars, please submit your "AI for good" work by 2/14: www.rhsmith.umd.edu/departments/...
rhsmith.umd.edu
Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good | Smith School
Join us at the Workshop on AI & Analytics for Social Good, themed around 'Analytics for Doing Good.' Hosted by the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland on May 2, 2025, this event gat...
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
Excited to see our paper "Generative AI Can Harm Learning" cited in Ch 7 of the 2025 Economic Report of the President: whitehouse.gov/cea/written-... Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers...., co-authored with @obastani.bsky.social, Alp, Haosen, Ozge & Rei
whitehouse.gov
The 2025 Economic Report of the President | CEA | The White House
Today, the Council of Economic Advisers under the leadership of Chair Jared Bernstein released the 2025 Economic Report of the President, the 79th report since the establishment of CEA in 1946. The 20...
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Hamsa Bastani @hamsabastani.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
Hi folks, I'm new here! 👋🏾
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