Fair-LLMs: Accelerating Fairness-Aware, Privacy-Preserving LLMs for Health Research

About the Project

These projects are open to students worldwide, but have no funding attached. Therefore, the successful applicant will be expected to fund tuition fees at the relevant level (home or international) and any applicable additional research costs. Please consider this before applying.

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to deliver significant benefits in health research by enhancing clinical diagnostic accuracy, medical writing, education, medical and health question-answering, and project management, but their blanket application across diverse demographic and cultural contexts could exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities [1]. This is due to several factors, including limited technological advancement, historical injustice, marginalisation, and underrepresentation of certain minority groups in training data, where AI reflects Western values, agendas and motives.

Fair-LLMs project aims to address the need for resourceful, fairness-aware, and privacy-preserving LLMs for health research by developing a framework for fair, privacy-preserving and transparent LLMs, including quantitative performance benchmarks (using structured question-answering datasets that allow numeric scoring) and qualitative safety/ethical benchmarks (assessing harms, bias, and alignment).

Focusing on LLMs for biomedical text generation and mining, the project will address potential harms (risks and ethical concerns) associated with bias and discrimination, the opacity of AI models, and fragmented data protection laws across different jurisdictions. In turn, the project will inform and support the development of more inclusive LLMs.

The project will develop novel LLM frameworks for biomedical text generation and mining, capturing region-specific medical knowledge and contextual variations across different cultural diversities.

Informal enquiries can be made by contacting Dr G Ogunniye (g.ogunniye@abdn.ac.uk).

Decisions will be based on academic merit. The successful applicant should have, or expect to obtain, a UK Honours Degree at 2.1 (or equivalent) in Computing Science.

We encourage applications from all backgrounds and communities, and are committed to having a diverse, inclusive team.

Application Procedure:

Formal applications can be completed online: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/pgap/login.php.

You should apply for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Science to ensure your application is passed to the correct team for processing.

Please clearly note the name of the lead supervisor and project titleon the application form. If you do not include these details, it may not be considered for the project.

Your application must include: A personal statement, an up-to-date copy of your academic CV, and clear copies of your educational certificates and transcripts.

Please note: you do not need to provide a research proposal with this application.

If you require any additional assistance in submitting your application or have any queries about the application process, please don't hesitate to contact us at researchadmissions@abdn.ac.uk

Funding Notes

This is a self-funding project open to students worldwide. Our typical start dates for this programme are February or October.

Fees for this programme can be found here Finance and Funding | Study Here | The University of Aberdeen.