Multimodal Intelligence for Health Transformation
Ramesh Jain is Emeritus Donald Bren Professor at UC Irvine and founding director of the Institute for Future Health.
The Institute for Future Health has its genesis in a moment of clarity that comes with cancer which forces you to confront death. After three decades pioneering AI, multimedia, and business systems, gastroesophageal cancer forced me to confront healthcare first as a patient, and then as a researcher. Medical intervention saved my life—brilliant crisis care when I needed it most. But where were the systems to help me build health during the thousands of hours between doctor visits? That question became IFH’s founding mission: create infrastructure for continuous health creation, not just episodic crisis response.
At IFH, we’ve applied decades of research in multimodal computing—recognized through fellowships in ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IAPR, AAAI, and SPIE, and awards including the ACM Distinguished Service Award (2022) for establishing SIGMultimedia, the ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, and the IEEE TCMC Impact Award for pioneering contributions to multimedia computing—to build foundational technologies for continuous health optimization. Personicle creates a personal chronicle—integrating data from wearables, smartphones, and health records into a unified understanding of each individual. The Personal Health Navigator (PHN) uses this data to provide continuous, personalized guidance. OpenCHA (Open Conversational Health Agent) makes this guidance accessible through natural conversation. These innovations converge in the Personal Care Utility (PCU)—a comprehensive system designed to work at billion-person scale, integrating multimodal intelligence with national health infrastructure.
This work is now laying foundations for health transformation starting with the first billion in India, then extending globally. We’re working with the Indian AI Research Organization (IAIRO) and India’s national health infrastructure to demonstrate how continuous health optimization can work at population scale—showing that health systems can shift from treating sickness to building aspirational health through lifestyle, environment, and behavior, with medicine and technology as enablers.
Before joining UCI, I spent three decades establishing foundational work in AI and multimedia computing. I founded the AI Lab at University of Michigan in 1987, held positions at UC San Diego and Georgia Tech, and built multiple successful technology companies including a publicly traded company. I established multimedia and multimodal computing as recognized disciplines, developed pioneering image and video database systems, and mentored students who went on to create technologies like Photoshop, iPod, and iPhone.
As Professor Emeritus at UCI and co-founder/director of IAIRO, I continue working to transform how humanity approaches health. I seek collaborators—researchers, policymakers, healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, students—who believe we need to rethink fundamental assumptions about health systems. The challenge isn’t building better crisis intervention. It’s weaving together multimodal intelligence, human behavior, and environmental context into systems that help billions of people flourish continuously.
Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow my Substack newsletter “Perspectives” for ongoing explorations of health transformation, multimodal intelligence, and the intersection of technology and human flourishing.
Contact: jain49@gmail.com