2025-26 Frederick L. Hovde Distinguished Lecturer

Susan Murphy

Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and of Computer Science and Associate Faculty of the Kempner Institute at Harvard University

 

Susan Murphy - Frederick L. Hovde Distinguished Lecture Series

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

DSAI 1069
10:30 - 11:30 AM - Lecture
Time TBD - Reception

 

Online Reinforcement Learning in Digital Health Interventions 

Abstract

In this talk I will discuss first solutions to some of the challenges we face in developing online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for use in digital health interventions targeting patients struggling with health problems such as substance misuse, hypertension and bone marrow transplantation. Digital health raises a number of challenges to the RL community including different sets of actions, each set intended to impact patients over a different time scale; the need to learn both within an implementation and between implementations of the RL algorithm; noisy environments and a lack of mechanistic models. In all of these settings the online line algorithm must be stable and autonomous. Despite these challenges, RL, with careful initialization, with careful management of bias/variance tradeoff and by close collaboration with health scientists can be successful. We can make an impact!

Bio 

Susan A. Murphy is Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and of Computer Science and Associate Faculty at the Kempner Institute, Harvard University. Her research focuses on improving sequential decision making via the development of online, real-time reinforcement learning algorithms. Her lab is involved in multiple deployments of these algorithms in digital health. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the US National Academy of Medicine. In 2013 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on experimental designs to inform sequential decision making. She is a Fellow of the College on Problems in Drug Dependence, Past-President of Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Past-President of the Bernoulli Society and a former editor of the Annals of Statistics.