For most, TikTok is a social media app for finding the latest dance trends, hot new restaurants and viral comedy sketches.
For Charles "Duke" Bickham, a doctoral student at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, artificial intelligence has transformed the app into a key tool for better understanding public sentiment on leading health issues.
On Friday, Bickham stood in front of a crowded lecture hall at the USC Caruso Catholic Center to discuss how he used AI to sift through tagged content to show how eating disorders are represented on the app - just one of the many ways AI can assist researchers.
Bickham's presentation, "EDTok: A Dataset for Eating Disorder Content on TikTok," was part of the USC Center for AI in Society's ShowCAIS 2025, a symposium that highlighted the work of USC students and faculty using AI for social good.
"[The data] not only enables researchers to explore possible research questions and research gaps, but this data set can allow us to better understand how TikTok affects and possibly exacerbates eating disorders," Bickham said.
His project was one of 18 presentations from speakers across eight schools at USC. In addition to USC Viterbi, the schools featured at the Friday event included the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, the USC Marshall School of Business, the USC Price School of Public Policy and the USC Rossier School of Education.
The event's mission is twofold: to highlight the important work at USC that is using AI for the benefit of society, and to foster a community of AI research for social good across the university, said Eric Rice, founding co-director of the Center for AI in Society and associate dean for research and professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
"AI is often thought of as something akin to magic, instead of a useful tool that can be used to help us to understand and address major social problems such as homelessness, suicide prevention and illegal wildlife trafficking," Rice said at the event.
ShowCAIS 2025: AI methods for good
The first series of presentations focused on AI solutions for homelessness, including a presentation on how AI can be used to quantify the effectiveness of street outreach for homeless services, and a presentation on the You Count Data Hub, California's first integrative dashboard on the state of youth homelessness.
Michàlle Mor Barak, the Dean's Endowed Professor of Social Work and Business at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and USC Marshall, delivered the daylong event's keynote presentation on community crisis response.
"We need to utilize the power of AI in order to address complex social problems," Mor Barak said. "But at the same time, we need to create social structures that will help harness that power for social good."
The afternoon session focused on the environmental impact of AI, specifically its use in illegal wildlife trafficking. In his presentation "Illegal Scales & TikTok Tales: Topic Analysis of Pangolin Content on TikTok," Frederick "Tony" Fernandes, a junior computer science student at USC Viterbi, demonstrated how he used AI to provide insight into the circulation of pangolin-related content on TikTok.
"Most people don't even really know what pangolins are outside of the conservation space, which is really sad and also kind of concerning because pangolins are the most trafficked mammal in the world," Fernandes said.
Pangolins account for about 20% of all illegal wildlife trafficking, according to Fernandes, and some 120 million tons of pangolin paraphernalia have been trafficked in the last five years.
"We need to understand pangolin perspectives globally to understand how people are either reacting to pangolins and how they view them," Fernandes said. "We wanted to do this on social media because social media is the modern-day global platform for discourse, and this will help us inform conservation initiatives."
AI for physical and mental health at ShowCAIS 2025
The longest session of the day - broken up into two parts - focused on AI's use in health care. Bickham's presentation on conversations around eating disorders on TikTok led off Part 1 of the session. Part 2 kicked off that afternoon - after the AI for the Environment session - with presentations on AI's use in suicide prevention and obtaining cancer treatment.
In the first presentation, "Identifying Intervention Opportunities for Suicide Prevention with LLM Assistants in Social Work," USC Viterbi doctoral student Jaspreet Ranjit explored using AI to assist social workers who manually annotate the National Violent Death Reporting System with summaries to add to its data collection.
"This is an extremely difficult task," Ranjit said. "Not only does the data contain very explicit and graphic content, but it's not uncommon for an abstractor to experience fatigue, which can leave room for annotation inconsistencies and discrepancies in human error."
Following Ranjit's presentation, Rodrigo Aguilar Barrios - another doctoral student at USC Viterbi - presented his project, "Detecting Distress to Improve Cancer Patient Care." Aguilar Barrios talked about the prevalence of distress in cancer patients and how that significantly affects their survival and recovery. Health providers already administer distress screenings, but the timing of these reports vary. The research presented focused on the use of biometric data and machine learning to reduce unreported distress time among cancer patients.
"Respiration rate, heart rate and heart rate availability can all be captured with simple smart watches," Aguilar Barrios said. "So, our goal is to enhance cancer patient care by providing oncologists with these early distress level symptoms."
For Phil Nelson, a director of engineering at Google who attended the Friday symposium, Aguilar Barrios' findings were among many at the event that speak to the vast potential of AI technology right now.
"The advances of recent years are just absolutely incredible," Nelson said. "This is just an amazing, amazing time … there's so many wonderful applications in accessibility, in education, climate, public health, conservation, mental health, so many of the things we're seeing here."
