AI Robots may be just the help older adults and their caretakers need. Just don't expect them to be cute little humanoids — yet.

YouTube video by The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney

The end of life is replete with relational complexities. Yet, despite the work of humanities and social science scholars in the field of death and dying, our final days and weeks are still often fram...

Perhaps the most valuable asset in our cultural imaginary is time. Yet, this notion of time-as-asset intensifies, is contested, and is often derailed …

Over the last two years, AI summits held in the UK and South Korea focused on safety and the need for guardrails in the development of this powerful technology — but this year’s summit in Paris gave w...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a rapidly escalating global health threat, known increasingly through different forms of monitoring. Surveillance, both of res...

Young refugees freed from Australian detention are then trapped by bridging visas that ban them from studying, deepening the damage inflicted by the immigration regime.

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This special issue aims to expand the sociological theorising of digital transformations in health care and medicine, focusing specifically on algorithmic (including AI and data-driven) technologies. We seek papers that will address increasingly important, and yet still emergent, matters of concern in the provision of healthcare and medicine and imaginaries of their futures. It is highly significant because advances in processing power and big data gathered through miniaturised sensors, advanced robotics, chatbots, and the Internet of Things, are contributing to an expansive range of algorithmic capabilities. Trained from big datasets, deep learning algorithms can recognise patterns and detect clinically relevant features in imaging data beyond what can be perceived by the human eye. In this way, algorithms have become important diagnostic agents in radiology, oncology, and reproductive medicine. Precision medicine is being rolled out with enormous investments in many countries, whereby algorithmic capabilities provide the basis for interpreting the patient’s genetic makeup to predict or diagnose diseases (such as cancer) and determine appropriate treatments. Through natural language processing capabilities, algorithms are being employed as conversational agents and increasingly utilised in therapeutic support for patients with depression and anxiety. For example, the Woebot app, operating on the principles and practices of cognitive behavioural therapy, walks users through a series of questions to understand their mental health problems and provide them with coping strategies. Algorithms are also beginning to understand context and, thereby, can adapt the interface of electronic health records to help clinicians focus on information relevant for the specific patient. The field of algorithmic medicine is rapidly expanding towards new areas such as examining facial micro-expressions to detect pain among people with dementia and neurological problems, mining genome data to identify severity risk of COVID infection, and the provision of the artificial pancreas to automate insulin dispensary in diabetes care.

Young adults living with chronic illness often experience considerable uncertainty across the emotional, cultural and medical spheres of their everyday lives. The process of seeking, receiving and re....

Sydney Environment Institute presents Strategies for a just and democratic climate economy The economy is an increasingly significant terrain of climate politics. The climate debate has moved on from ...

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Bringing together thought leaders from across the University and beyond to tackle the greatest challenges of our time.

Work with Dr Michelle Peterie and the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies team to generate foundational knowledge about children’s experiences of immigration detention and deportation Full-time (1.0FT...