Sydney Pugh

Sydney Pugh is a computer scientist interested in building trustworthy and interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) for clinical decision support. Her current research focuses on developing a real-time multimodal AI-based system for the early detection of cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s dementia, and related dementias. She is leveraging large language models (LLMs) to extract diagnostic clues of cognitive impairment – such as repetitive speech or word-finding difficulty – from patient-provider conversations in primary care settings to inform an interpretable predictive model. Sydney earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania where she worked on weakly-supervised methods for evaluating the performance of medical AI systems.