Ivania Martinez’s work combines economics, data science, and public policy to support data-driven decision-making and social impact.
Topic
informatics
Sina-Marie Mayer: Intersection of data science, AI, and public policy.
Sina-Marie Mayer works at the intersection of data science, AI, and public policy. In a directed research project, she analyzes large-scale Reddit data using natural language processing and topic modeling to examine how fear and stress appear in public discourse around artificial intelligence.
Ayse Sert Oti: AI Governance, Health Equity, and Public Policy
Ayse aims to work at the intersection of AI governance, health equity, and public policy. Her current project, CASN (Cognitive Autonomy & Safety Negotiation), explores a privacy-aware AI decision-support system designed to help dementia caregivers navigate high-risk situations.
Leveraging AI to enhance patient care and better healthcare systems
“The MPI Program didn’t just teach the “how” of data, but the “why” of using it to improve people’s lives”
Bloustein School Joins National Service to Service Initiative
The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University–New Brunswick is pleased to announce its participation in Service to Service, a national initiative led by the Volcker Alliance and We the Veterans and Military Families. The program connects veterans and military families with public service education pathways, helping them transition into impactful careers in public leadership.
MPI Grad Students Present MOMCare with AI
This paper presents MOMCare, a chatbot designed to support mothers navigating the challenges of PPD. MOMCare has a retrieval-augmented architecture with an end-to-end pipeline from data preprocessing to response generation. It employs hybrid classification, a dual embedding system, a dual verification guardrail, and a medical domain-specific reranking mechanism to generate empathetic and relevant PPD responses.
Samuel Researches Gambling Harm Reduction in Online Spaces
Our exploratory analyses suggest that this reddit forum provides important information on how users communicate motivations to gamble, interpretations of gambling experiences, and define potential harms related to gambling online as well as how to avoid or remedy those harms.
RAISE-25 Recap – Our Future With AI: Utopian or Dystopian?
Hosted by the Master of Public Informatics (MPI) program, the final round of the second annual RAISE-25 Informatics – Data Science competition was held Friday, April 11, 2025, at the Bloustein School. The competition challenge focused on “Our Future With AI: Utopian or Dystopian?”
RAISE-24 Recap: Does News Media Spread Fear of AI?
The final round for the RAISE-24 Informatics – Data Science competition was held Friday, April 19, 2024 at the Bloustein School. Hosted by the Master of Public Informatics (MPI) program, the inaugural competition challenge asked competitors “Does News Media Spread Fear of AI?”
Research by Jim Samuel et al. “Customized AI Readers: An Adaptive Framework for Flexible Human Handwriting Recognition of Numerical Digits with OCR Methods”
This study develops an index dubbed the pandemic vulnerability index at city level (PVI-CI) for classifying the pandemic vulnerability levels of cities, grouping them into five vulnerability classes, from very high to very low. It provides critical wisdom needed for urban healthcare policy and resource management.