Hi! I am Sydney Pugh, a postdoctoral researcher in the Artificial Intelligence for Ambulatory Care Innovation (AI-4-AI) Lab at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania, where I am advised by Kevin Johnson. My research interests are in developing safe and effective medical AI systems, with emphasis on techniques to address challenges associated with real-world medical data constraints (e.g., small data, lack of ground-truth). Currently, I am working on developing a real-time multimodal AI system for early detection of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s dementia.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania in August 2024, where I was advised by Insup Lee and James Weimer. My disseration explored weakly-supervised methods for rapid and cost-effective performance evaluation of medical AI systems. I also earned my M.S.E. in CIS at UPenn in 2021. Prior to that, I earned my B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Loyola University Maryland in 2019.

News

• September 9, 2025: Our paper “WATCH-SS: Developing a Trustworthy and Explainable Modular Framework for Detecting Cognitive Impairment from Spontaneous Speech” was accepted to the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB26)! Check out the preprint here.
• August 21, 2025: Our paper “MedVidDeID: Protecting Privacy in Clinical Encounter Video Recordings” was accepted to the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI).
• March 17, 2025: I was accepted into the Penn AI Fellows program!
• March 4, 2025: Our paper “Towards a Real-time Clinical Agenda Setting System for Enhancing Clinical Interactions in Primary Care Visits” was presented at the AAAI Workshop on Large Language Models and Generative AI for Health (GenAI4Health).
• October 1, 2024: I started my postdoc position in the AI-4-AI Lab at UPenn!
• August 9, 2024: I earned my Ph.D. at UPenn!