AImpact

Mashfiqui Rabbi is an Assistant Research Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, and the Director of Mobile Sensing and Intervention at the Health Care Engineering Systems Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previously, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Optum AI under UnitedHealth Group, the largest payer and one of the largest providers in U.S. healthcare. He received his Ph.D. in Information Science from Cornell University under Professor Tanzeem Choudhury. His Ph.D. thesis led to the creation of the MyBehavior app, the first mobile recommender system to automatically generate personalized physical activity and food suggestions from mobile phone data. Mashfiqui was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, where he worked with Professor Susan Murphy and created the first just-in-time intervention for improving health app engagement. This engagement intervention was later adopted by three NIH-funded grants focusing on youth substance abuse, cancer rehabilitation, and sickle cell disease. He continued his work as a Research Scientist at Apple Health AI, where he helped establish the AI-based intervention group. His Sub-Goal app was adopted for the custom plan feature in Apple’s Fitness+ app in iOS 17, which is currently used by millions of Apple users. Mashfiqui’s work has been featured in MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, The Economist, Mashable, and The New York Times.