Socially Responsible Data Collection and Network Intervention Codesigns

Data collection is an important bottleneck in social network intervention designs. While prior work has paid much attention to reducing costs and maximizing benefits of the collected data, it is equally important to note the vulnerability of individuals to being left out of the collected data or being unduly exposed in the collected data because of the interventions. For example, public health professionals engage with vulnerable populations to improve effectiveness of HIV and suicide prevention programs. These community relations can be harmed if public health efforts pose excessive privacy risks to individuals or fail to effectively address the inequalities in the population. This project seeks to reconcile efficiency with equity and privacy considerations in the design of complex social network interventions. The focus is on developing a co-design framework for data collection and network intervention in large-scale, limited-information and resource-constrained environments where information acquisition is especially challenging and decision-makers need to strategize about how to deploy their limited resources across the entire scale of their system; not only to optimize intervention outcomes, but to do so in a socially responsible manner