SS02: Machine Learning in Mental Health
Pepijn van de Ven
Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering, University of Limerick, Ireland
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related data analytics have made a considerable impact on our daily lives in recent years and are now also starting to be explored in a mental health context. Whilst it is important to keep in mind that modern AI techniques are associated with considerable risks around fairness, autonomy, explicability, accountability and technical robustness, use of AI in our daily lives suggests it is here to stay and, when applied appropriately and responsibly, can result in meaningful benefits when applied to mental health interventions. This special session aims to bring together researchers from the various areas that underpin use of AI in mental health to discuss some of the key opportunities as well as issues in the application of AI to mental health. Examples of opportunities are early prediction of treatment outcomes, data-driven personalisation of interventions and the extraction of new insights from data. Examples of issues encountered in the use of AI in mental health are the perceived reduction in patient-therapist relationship, safety of AI derived decisions and recommendations, and the explainability of predictions made by AI components.
The organiser will solicit contributions from AI experts active in this field as well as mental health domain experts with the objective of providing a multidisciplinary perspective of the current and future role of AI in mental health interventions and research.
Organizer
Dr. Pepijn van de Ven is a Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His research interests are in the application of mobile technologies and AI in mental health interventions. Recent projects include the Proactive project, a UK MRC funded research project with King’s College London, the University of Saõ Paulo and the University of Bristol. In this project Pepijn was responsible for development of the technical infrastructure used to deliver a depression intervention and to store data collected during this intervention. He is also responsible for the advanced data analytics used to analyse the data gathered during the intervention.