Fondation Brocher | Barbara Barbosa Neves

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Barbara Barbosa Neves

Senior Horizon Fellow - The University of Sydney
Australia

03.09.2025-30.09.2025

Artificial Intelligence for Social Health in Later Life Care

My research program (2023-2026) will provide a globally-leading and foundational analysis of AI in ageing, capturing benefits and dangers for our most vulnerable. It will advance new understandings of AI-based care to address loneliness, social isolation, and exclusion in later life, delivering comprehensive knowledge to guide the development of healthier, inclusive, and sustainable later life care models. This program will be a landmark study of ageing and AI, being the first to map and compare how different AI technologies – from robots to chatbots – are being developed, implemented, and used for social care in aged-care homes (‘institutional ageing’) and for those living alone in the community (‘ageing in place’). It will address three overarching aims:
1. Assessment: Map how care home stakeholders perceive/use AI for social health and its care outcomes.
2. Development: Develop communities of practice to select and co-design the deployment of diverse AI-based technologies to address social health in different aged care environments.
3. Evaluation: Identify inclusive, sustainable, and high-quality person-centred models of later-life care that integrate AI. Create best practices and policies for national and global benefit.

LinkedIn profile

Barbara Barbosa Neves (PhD, FHEA, FRSA) is an award-winning sociologist of technology and ageing, specialising in loneliness and digital inequalities in later life. Her academic background bridges social sciences, computer science/human-computer interaction (HCI), and gerontology. She currently holds a prestigious Horizon Fellowship on AI at the University of Sydney, where she leads the AI Social Science theme at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies. Before moving to Australia, she was Associate Director of the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Her research has shaped technology and policy design, cited by the UN, OECD, WHO, EU, and governments in 13 countries. Barbara has secured over $7M in funding from research agencies in Australia, Canada, and Europe. Her mixed methods, co-design research has received 28 awards across North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2022 (UK) and one of the ABC Top 5 Social Science Scholars in Australia (2019).

Barbara's scholarly output includes more than 90 publications across leading journals in both social and computer sciences, with +4,500 citations, h-index of 34, and an FWCI of 14.45 in discrimination and 5.44 in loneliness/social isolation. She was recognised by ScholarGPS as a Top Scholar in Digital Electronics, placing in the top 0.5% worldwide for publication impact and excellence (2024). Five of her publications have received international awards, including a US-based industry award for translational research, namely the 2024 Mather Institute on Innovative Aging Award.

She has delivered 58 invited keynotes across five continents and at institutions like MIT and Max Planck, as well as hospitals and community centres. Additionally, she has presented at 49 academic and industry conferences. A sought-after media commentator, Barbara has also engaged extensively with the media: +200 contributions – ranging from op-eds to radio, press, and TV interviews – across outlets such as The Guardian, ABC, CBC, with an estimated audience of 600M people.

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