Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new concept; if you’ve ever used a program that checks your spelling and grammar, you’ve used a form of AI! However, the release of products like ChatGPT has kicked off a boom in AI technology, and it is growing more sophisticated every day. 

So how does this AI boom affect our work in tobacco control evaluation? I took a deep dive into the topic to find out!

It is an exciting time in the public health world!  State and local policymakers are taking action to reduce the availability of the tobacco industry’s deadly products in the retail environment.

When you need to collect data, how do you know what’s important to ask? Do you brainstorm a list of questions? Or do you dust off an instrument your project has used in the past? If you wonder about that, the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center (TCEC) has an array of tools that can help!

Collaboration unites people, ideas, and surveys. Yes. You read that right. Surveys. Mono County’s Tobacco Education Program (TEP) has been working with their Local Oral Health Program to deliver a tobacco cessation survey to dental providers. Their collaboration is just one example of the many that already exist and are forming. I’ve had the privilege of interviewing Lauren Kemmeter, Project Director of Mono County’s TEP.

To get to know more about their collaboration, I wanted to understand who they are first.

If you haven’t taken the time to explore the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center’s website, you might be missing out on evaluation lifesaving information! In this series, we highlight some of the online resources TCEC provides to our partners in tobacco control.

As the observations for the End Commercial Tobacco Campaign wrap up, TCEC staff had the chance to assist Local Lead Agencies with their data collections. As always, TCEC is happy to help, and when we do we like to write up our experience. This time around, Jorge Andrews and Danielle Lippert went out in the summer heat and put their evaluator skills to the test. Here are their stories:

How to use evaluation to win campaigns. 

That’s how Paul Knepprath of the American Heart Association’s Tobacco Endgame Center for Organizing and Engagement characterized the presentation that TCEC gave on the Tobacco Endgame Center’s March Affinity call.

When science fiction imagines how the future might look, these visions often include either helpful robots (like Rosie from The Jetsons), or menacing machines (like the titular character in The Terminator). Either way, the robots of the fictional future are machines that people interact with in the physical world. Coming back to the present, the bots have arrived-- and they are not how we imagined.

Over the next 12 months, LLAs will be conducting two separate sets of KIIs: one that I like to call, “Contract Extension KII” and one that I call, “ECTC KII.”  The Contract Extension KII were added to LLAs’ current 2017-2021 workplans, and the ECTC KII, short for End Commercial Tobacco Campaign, is a required evaluation activity for LLA’s upcoming 2022-2025 workplans.  This article aims to clarify the difference between the two and share resources for helping you ensure these activities are useful to your communities.

Attention Local Lead Agencies!