Woojin Jung

Woojin Jung, Ph.D., MSW/MPP, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, at the Rutgers School of Social Work. She is also a core faculty member of Rutgers Global Health Institute and a faculty affiliate of the Urban and Civic Informatics Lab at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. Woojin Jung’s research lies at the intersection of global poverty, social welfare policy, and AI/ML data science. Her work focuses on developing global poverty metrics and optimizing the allocation of social resources in resource-constrained regions. She leverages satellite imagery, social media, geographic attributes, and connectivity data to predict poverty, food security, and climate resilience, creating vulnerability maps in select regions of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These maps, developed in collaboration with governments, international organizations, and NGOs, aim to enhance the targeting of aid and social welfare policies in each country.

 Beyond producing accurate national-level prediction maps, Woojin’s projects delve into local contexts. Her work engages communities to incorporate visual indicators of poverty into feature selection. Specifically, her research is developing a segmentation model that identifies intuitive features based on community input, supported by the OVPR AI grant. Her study also utilizes integrated gradient-based explainable AI (XAI) techniques to identify patterns of poor predictions in the standard approach and to improve existing ensemble/deep learning architectures. Most recently, she has developed a geostatistical AI framework to make robust poverty predictions and optimize resource distribution at the subnational level. Her research has received support from NSF, Microsoft, and the Cyberinfrastructure & AI for Science and Society initiative.