Small Model Health Diary
Using a small model for information extraction of a health diary.
About
I'm a PhD student at the University of Cambridge,
working with Prof. Cecilia Mascolo in the Mobile Systems Lab.
Previously, I completed my
MS at the University of Washington, with Prof. Shwetak Patel in the Ubicomp Lab, and my BS at the University of Toronto, with Prof. Alex Mariakakis in the CHAI Lab.
Research interests
- Representation Learning
- Turning heterogenous behavioral, physiological, and biological data into physiologically-grounded embeddings useful for clinical and health-improving downstream tasks.
- Health Language Models
- Multimodal systems capable of integrating clinical text with diverse health modalities to provide comprehensive, data-driven insights for personalized medicine and clinical decision support.
Selected publications
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Brenna Li, Liam Bakar, …, Alex Mariakakis, and Khai N. Truong. “Digitizing the Pre-consultation Experience: Impacts and Design Recommendations.” CHI ’26, 2026.
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Liam Bakar, …, Shwetak Patel, and Vikram Iyer. “SnappyMeal: Design and Longitudinal Evaluation of a Multimodal AI Food Logging Application.” arXiv, 2025.
Selected projects
SnappyMeal
Context-aware, flexible nutritional logging using a multimodal AI application.
Multimodal cancer risk analysis
Exploring AI techniques and modalities for analyzing risk in cancer patients.
Pre-consultation chatbot
Addressing survey fatigue while giving physicians better context before consultations.
Writing
Teaching a Tiny Local Model to Organize My Health Diary
Fine-tuning Qwen3-0.6B to turn free-form health diary entries into structured logs. What can we do with this knowledge? Where can we go from here?
Game Theory IRL
Games are everywhere in our lives—but should we model our relationships around winning them?
Some pictures
Life through a lens—or several.
Are LLMs the new calculators?
Thoughts on language models, learning, and what classrooms should preserve.
USA Men’s Volleyball
The structural ceiling limiting men’s volleyball in the United States.
Contact
I’m open to conversations about research, projects, and collaboration.
lbakar@uw.edubakar.liam.20@gmail.com