Postdoc at @Cambridge_CL, studying HRI and conversational AI for well-being 🤖🧠 Incoming Assistant Professor at @bengurionu Engineering.

Cambridge, UK
Joined July 2012
Does an AI doctor know when not to order a test? That is one of the hardest things in medicine. Patients ask for an extra scan "just to be safe," and an unnecessary MRI often finds a harmless disc bulge that sets off more worry, more referrals and sometimes procedures nobody needed. A new study in Annals of Internal Medicine, from Ben-Gurion University and Clalit Health Services in Israel, tested six leading models from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI on hundreds of clinical cases built around Choosing Wisely, the global campaign against low-value care. Every case had a twin: the young man with back pain after lifting furniture who needs no imaging, and the woman with a history of breast cancer and new back pain at night who does. When care was needed, the models wrongly held it back in only 0.6% of cases. When it wasn't needed, they recommended it anyway in 5.4%. In eight of the fifteen recommendations they never suggested a single unnecessary test. Most of the mistakes landed where doctors themselves disagree, like whether to scan small thyroid nodules found by chance. The weak spot is social. As Guy Laban, the Ben-Gurion researcher who co-led the study, points out, a doctor has to stand firm in front of an anxious patient, while language models tend to go along with whoever is asking. I work on AI medicine at Certuma, and to me this is where AI can do the most good. Restraint saves money and it saves patients from harm. The best doctor is not the one who orders everything. It's the one who knows when to stop.
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In 225 clinical scenarios based on Choosing Wisely recommendations, LLMs aligned with evidence-based guidance, recommending potentially unnecessary tests or treatments in just 5.4% of responses and rarely withholding appropriate care. Researchers found that LLMs were more likely to suggest unnecessary care in scenarios where clinical guidance is debated or symptoms could reasonably justify additional testing.   These findings suggest that commercial LLMs generally align with evidence-based principles of medical restraint while highlighting opportunities for targeted improvement. bit.ly/3UevlnQ @deanarielmd @ClalitHealth @GuyLaban @bengurionu
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Thank you @GuyLaban for helping us understand the human side of AI!
Israel continues to lead the way in artificial intelligence, with groundbreaking research at @bengurionu of the Negev helping shape the country's future. Dr. Guy Laban explains how Al can improve everyday life and why continued investment in innovation is essential for Israel. 🇮🇱 Support @A4BGU groundbreaking research: iltvisrael.com/wayforward-a4…
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This week we hosted Guy Laban for a fascinating talk as part of the Sagol School of Neuroscience seminar series. Thank you for an insightful and thought-provoking lecture! @GuyLaban
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Can a robot help you cope with emotional challenges? 🤖 New research led by Prof. @GuyLaban (BGU) with collaborators at Cambridge shows that structured conversations with a social robot improved students’ emotional understanding, sense of control, and mood over time.
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SPASM: Stable Persona-driven Agent Simulation for Multi-turn Dialogue Generation Han Luo, Guy Laban arxiv.org/abs/2604.09212 [𝚌𝚜.𝙲𝙻 𝚌𝚜.𝙼𝙰] 💬Accepted to Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
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Guy Laban retweeted
A chatbot’s introduction can influence how much users open up. When a chatbot is framed as a human, people tend to disclose more and feel more comforted—even if they suspect it’s not actually a person. dlvr.it/TPCMX1
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It's been a summer of accolades for our researchers. Work by several members of this Department was honoured by leading conferences and organisations in fields ranging from #AI to #cybersecurity to #socialrobotics. Congratulations to our colleagues! cst.cam.ac.uk/news/summer-ac…
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Guy Laban retweeted
The #CUI2025 PROCEEDINGS are now LIVE in the ACM Digital Library! 📖🔍 Dive into the papers here: dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/1… The conference kicks off TOMORROW (July 8) — just one sleep away!! Looking forward to a great week ahead! See you soon! 👏👏👏
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Guy Laban retweeted
📢 Call for Papers Join us at the Bias and Fairness in Conversational User Interfaces workshop 💬 🗓️ July 8–10, 2025 📍 Waterloo, Canada (AT @CUI_Conference @ACM_CUI) Keynotes: Dorian Peters & @micol_spitale 🔗 Submit your work, demos, or provocations!➡️ sites.google.com/view/cuibnf…
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What People Share With a Robot When Feeling Lonely and Stressed and How It Helps Over Time. arxiv.org/abs/2504.02991
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Join us for the REACT 2025 Challenge on Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation (MAFRG). Developing digital human/virtual agent that can express human-style facial reactions using our recently established MARS dataset (video, audio & EEG). lnkd.in/egrUga42
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Paper with Yael Millgram & @mk_nock: Using two EMA studies, we found that participants with current suicidal thoughts knew less about the sources of their emotions compared to those with no suicidal thoughts, and comp to controls with other psych symptoms. psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-…
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Guy Laban retweeted
Past, Present, and Future: A Survey of The Evolution of Affective Robotics For Well-being. arxiv.org/abs/2407.02957
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Oh wow, new research showing how effective robotics and AI to human well-being. Maybe a few social robots wouldn't all that bad after all? arxiv.org/html/2407.02957v1
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