Penn professors receive $1 million toward anti-smoking research

A team of Penn researchers is $1 million closer to ending cigarette smoking.

Communications professor Joseph Cappella and Computer and Information Science professor Michael Kearns received a $1 million grant Tuesday from the National Institutes of Health which they will use to evaluate anti-smoking messages.

The team will use the grant “to help select anti-smoking appeals that will work for individual smokers,” Cappella said, adding that their approach will be very different from past approaches of studying the same effects.

The duo’s “interest is in smoking cessation and how media or messages or videos can help them quit and discovering which kinds of messages are most effective,” Kearns said.

The researchers plan to find an algorithm for individual preferences of smoking cessation appeals, modeled after those used by companies such as Netflix and Amazon.

“Netflix uses algorithms to recommend movies to users based on the recommendations of other users who have similar tastes,” Kearns said.

Cappella approached Kearns with the idea of “taking this technology and applying it to a health problem, Kearns said. Instead of rating movies for entertainment values, the team’s study will examine people’s preferences for videos about quitting smoking.

Although Cappella has studied anti-smoking appeals for years, research has been slow, Cappella explained. The grant will help them “leapfrog,” moving more quickly in the process, he added.

Anti-smoking appeals are important because “it’s the one behavior that we know for sure is a source of lung cancer,” Cappella said. “If we can prevent people from starting smoking and get people smoking to quit we’ll have a substantial influence … that will help save lives.”

Because the method — the use of algorithms to make media suggestions — is so different than methods employed in the past, “we really aren’t sure if it’s going to work in this arena,” Cappella said.

“That external funders … were willing to take a chance on this work means that we have a chance to make a large impact in a much shorter period of time, and that’s both exhilarating and a little scary,” Cappella said.

The idea makes “a leap from one field to another,” Kearns said. Although it’s unknown what the results will bring, a high risk may yield “huge societal and commercial medical benefits.”

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