David Sontag

David Sontag is a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and head of the Clinical Machine Learning Group. He is also an investigator at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research focuses on advancing machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, and using those tools to transform health care. He and his group develop algorithms that use data to make better clinical predictions; create novel methods for answering causal queries that work effectively with high-dimensional data; and are building a foundation for the next-generation of intelligent electronic health records.

Selected Publications

• Jia, F., Sontag, D., & Agrawal, M. (2025). How does my language model understand clinical text? In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 287, pp. 720–743). PMLR.
• Mozannar, H., Chen, V., Alsobay, M., Das, S., Zhao, S., Wei, D., Nagireddy, M., Sattigeri, P., Talwalkar, A., & Sontag, D. (2025). The RealHumanEval: Evaluating large language models’ abilities to support programmers. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR).
• Shen, Z., Lang, H., Wang, B., Kim, Y., & Sontag, D. (2024). Learning to decode collaboratively with multiple language models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 12974–12990). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Media

• October 21, 2024: MIT News, Making it easier to verify an AI model’s responses
• September 16, 2024: MIT News, Enhancing LLM collaboration for smarter, more efficient solutions
• December 8, 2023: MIT News, Automated system teaches users when to collaborate with an AI assistant