Hannah E. Davis

Hannah E. Davis (born ) is an American artist, data scientist and long COVID researcher. She was one of the founders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC), a group of long COVID patients with experience in research or data analysis.

Machine learning and art Davis's work as a generative artist focused on music, sentiment analysis and bias in datasets.

A major theme of Davis's work was translating text into music, particularly generating music from the emotional data of the text. One of the projects Davis worked on turned publicly available books into music, generating music based on the emotion of the input text. Initially, her analysis was able to pick up the "rhythm" of books, for instance short sentences for Ernest Hemingway, and more flowery rhythms for work from Virginia Woolf. She built this work using a resource by Saif Mohammad, who had developed a lexicon mapping a large set of words onto eight basic emotions. The resulting tool, Transprose, created short musical pieces that mirrored the emotional tone of various novels.

She was commissioned by the Italian art collective D20 to produce a piece played on a factory-turned instrument, called "Fabbrica Alta". Her piece "Percival", commissioned by SynthBeats Laptop Orchestra, was a piece designed to be played by six performers and also focused on subjective interpretation of text translated into music.

In 2019, Davis co-created an installation called The Laughing Room with author Jonny Sun. They trained an AI on standup comedy transcripts from women, nonbinary, and BIPOC comedians to learn what was funny; the AI was then placed in a room with chairs and a sofa, and people could talk to it to try evoking a laughing response. This was installed at the 2019 TED Conference, with additional installations at the Cambridge Public Library and The New American Festival.

Davis often presented on bias in machine learning datasets and about her own work; she regularly spoke at international art-tech festivals including Eyeo, Strange Loop, and . In 2019, she opened the renowned Transmediale, an annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin. In September 2019, the Library of Congress invited her to speak as part of their Machine Learning + Libraries report on the state of the field, where she advocated that "a dataset is a worldview" and that "classification is violence" while urging caution in choosing input data used to train machine learning models.

Long COVID research and advocacy Davis got COVID-19 in the first wave, in March 2020. When she still had severe symptoms after three weeks and her physician attributed her symptoms to ADHD, she started to look for others experiencing the longer-term effects of COVID-19. She was still only able to work a couple hours per day at that point. In a study published in The Lancet's subsidiary journal eClinicalMedicine, she detailed how symptoms changed over time in the first 7 months after infection. She authored a 2023 review of long COVID in Nature Reviews Microbiology, co-authored by cardiologist Eric Topol. In 2024, she co-authored another review of long Covid in Nature Medicine along with Eric Topol, Akiko Iwasaki, and Ziyad Al-Aly.

In July 2022, she testified for the COVID-19 select committee in the US House of Representatives.

Publications

Al-Aly Z, Davis H, McCorkell L, Soares L, Wulf-Hanson S, Iwasaki A, Topol EJ. Long COVID science, research and policy. Nature Medicine. volume 30, pages 2148–2164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03173-6