The AI Disruption Speaker Series: Yue Guo

Yue Guo, MBBS, PhD, is a physician-scientist and Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of clinical medicine, health informatics, and natural language processing, with an emphasis on developing computational methods that make medical information more accessible, trustworthy, and actionable for clinicians, patients, and researchers. Dr. Guo earned her PhD in Health Informatics from the University of Washington, following her medical training (MBBS) at Capital Medical University and epidemiology training at Johns Hopkins University. Before joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she conducted research at Microsoft Research, Google, and the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). Her scholarly contributions have been recognized through multiple honors, including the AAAI New Faculty Highlight, Edward H. Shortliffe Doctoral Dissertation Award finalist, and the Arnold O. Beckman Research Award.

Abstract:
Health information is widely available, yet it often fails to support understanding and decision-making by non-experts. In this talk, I show that LLM-generated health explanations— while often fluent and even preferred by readers— do not reliably improve human comprehension compared to expert-written summaries. Through controlled evaluations and large-scale human studies, I identify a key reason for this gap: current automated evaluation and optimization methods favor surface quality over human-centered criteria such as understanding and actionability. Moving beyond diagnosis, I present LLM-based personalization as a path forward, demonstrating how integrating external knowledge and lightweight model adaptation to readers’ backgrounds can better support meaningful understanding and actionable health decisions. Together, this work shows that aligning LLM objectives, evaluation, and personalization is critical for effective health communication.

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Speaker Series continues in Fall on the new theme of “The AI Disruption.” Our speakers will discuss how recent advances in AI have reshaped their research — what has been made easier and what has become more difficult — and reflect upon its broader disruptive impact on society.

We meet most Wednesdays, 9am-10am Central time, in Zoom.  Everyone is welcome to attend.  More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series website.  For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list.  Our Spring 2026 series is led by Yuanxi Fu and Timothy McPhillips, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.