Janna Hastings is a computer scientist and psychologist who studies the interface between technology and humans in medicine as Assistant Professor of Medical Knowledge and Decision Support at the Universities of St. Gallen and Zurich. Research topics in her group include the impact of digitalisation on clinical work, artificial intelligence for medical applications, evidence synthesis, and explainable AI. She is interested in the intersection of language and medicine in two broad areas: (1) the use of modern language technology (including large language models) for automation of clinical work and knowledge management, and (2) the relationship between language and conceptualisation in constraining and interpreting the data that can be collected and synthesised during the research process, for example in the context of mental health. 

We very much welcome BA and MA thesis proposals! 

One potential project is that we would like to evaluate LLM technology for automating clinical note taking as well for the extraction of structured information from existing free text clinical notes with a particular focus on performance in the local Swiss language context. 

Another potential project is that we would like to explore the use of LLM technology for providing human-readable explanations of AI-based image classification algorithms. 

A third project relates to the use of contested language terms in mental health contexts, where we would like to compare the use of contested terms across different research communities e.g. psychiatry vs. psychology, as well as between the academic community and the public-facing media.