Creating Personalized AI Partnerships with Maytal Saar-Tsechans, UT Austin

NYU CUSP is pleased to host our annual Research Seminar Series, featuring leading voices in the growing field of urban informatics. The seminars will examine real-world challenges facing cities and urban environments around the world, with topics ranging from citizen and social sciences to smart infrastructure.

Why We Need Organizationally-Grounded & Personalized AI Partners and How to Produce Them

Recent studies highlight the potential of AI to improve high-stakes human decisions in critical domains like healthcare. Despite these promising prospects, AI systems to advice experts in such contexts often fail to deliver tangible value to organizations. In this talk, Professor Maytal Saar-Tsechansky will first argue how key properties of AI-assisted high-stakes decision-making contexts are crucial to inform the development of AI advisors that meaningfully benefit decision-makers and organizations. State-of-the-art AI for advising experts is produced independently of the experts and of the organization they intend to benefit. However, she will demonstrate why idiosyncratic properties of these environments, such as an expert’s decision-making behaviors, the patterns shaping experts’ discretion of AI counsel, and the organization's tolerance of the inherent costs of engagement with AI to improve high-stakes decisions are crucial to inform the development of effective human-AI teams that benefit organizations. She will then present a framework that builds on these understandings to generate personalized and organizationally-aware AI advisors and will share results on its performance. Our results demonstrate not only the opportunity to amplify high-stakes decision-making in high-stakes settings, but also underscore our framework’s effectiveness at producing efficient advisors with the necessary properties to catalyze the widespread adoption of AI-assisted advising in organizations. Professor Saar-Tsechansky will conclude with a proposed AI research agenda in business for advancing impactful human-AI collaboration.

About the Speaker

Maytal Saar-Tsechansky is the Mary John and Ralph Spence Centennial Professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-founder of Sweetch, an AI-based health company. Her research focuses on advancing AI to improve decision-making and to benefit people, organizations, and society. Her recent work focuses on human-AI collaboration and trustworthy AI with the overarching goal of bringing to bear human, organizational, and societal goals and constraints to catalyze AI systems’ positive impact in the world.

This agenda includes AI systems that cost-effectively learn from imperfect and biased humans, and advancing AI towards human-AI teams tasked with low- and high-stakes decision-making, involving both predictions and course of action choices. Her research has been informed and inspired by active collaborations with organizations, businesses, and domain experts. Over the years, her research addressed challenges in a variety of domains, including health care, the future of work, renewable energy, audit, and finance. Her work has been supported by government and industry, including the National Science Foundation and the Israeli Science Ministry. Maytal leads the University of Texas at Austin’s Translational AI initiative and is an academic board member of the university’s Machine Learning Lab.

How to Attend

NYU CUSP Research Seminars are only open to faculty, students, and staff at NYU – they are not open to the public at this time. This event will be held in-person, but we are now offering hybrid access to attendees! If you'd like to attend virtually, check the bottom of your Eventbrite confirmation email for the Zoom link.

Host or Publisher NYU Center for Urban Science + Progress