Last summer, I had the opportunity to intern at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where I worked under the guidance of Prof. Pradeeban Karthiravelu on the DREAMS Project — Developing a Reflective and Empathetic AI Model for Storytelling. The project aimed to build a Narrative Medicine platform that supports recovering individuals by analyzing their personal stories, experiences, and emotions shared through written narratives.

Our vision was to create an intelligent system capable of understanding human recovery journeys through language. The platform leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to automatically extract patterns, sentiments, and behavioral markers from user-created posts. These insights help clinicians and mental health professionals better understand patient progress, emotional states, and potential risks, thereby enabling more empathetic and data-informed interventions.

My contributions included designing and training data-driven models for text classification and sentiment analysis, developing a data ingestion and preprocessing pipeline, and helping to architect the system’s analytical framework for longitudinal pattern recognition. I also worked on exploring time-aware narrative modeling, where we analyzed how an individual’s tone and sentiment evolved throughout their recovery journey.

Through this internship, I gained deep hands-on experience with Machine Learning workflows, text mining, and computational modeling of human narratives. Beyond the technical aspects, the project strengthened my appreciation for the ethical and human-centered dimensions of AI, especially in healthcare contexts.