Please join us for our next virtual Brown Bag Seminar featuring Dr. Vivek Singh, founding Director of the Behavioral Informatics Lab and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers. Dr. Singh will be discussing “Behavioral Informatics for Mental Health.”

Abstract: Approximately 1 in 7 people globally, which equates to roughly 1 billion individuals, suffer from one or more mental or substance use disorders. As a result, there is a growing interest in developing automated or low-cost methods for triaging and supporting individuals experiencing psychosocial distress. The Behavioral Informatics Lab (behavioralinformatics.org) at Rutgers University focuses on leveraging information technology to understand and assist human behavior. This presentation will highlight early research from the lab on developing fair and robust computational models for mental health. Specifically, the talk will cover novel approaches to utilizing digital traces of behavioral data (e.g., Google search history, YouTube logs, phone logs, and geo-traces) in combination with machine learning to automatically predict various facets of mental health. The talk will also address methods for auditing the fairness of these mental health algorithms across genders and revising them as necessary to ensure equity.

Bio: Dr. Vivek Singh is the founding Director of the Behavioral Informatics Lab and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and received his post-doctoral training at MIT.  His work has appeared in leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary publication venues (e.g., Science, ACM Multimedia, ACM CHI) and has been covered by popular media (e.g., The New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal). He was selected as one of the “Rising Star Speakers” by ACM SIG-Multimedia in 2016 and he is actively involved with conference organization in similar space (e.g., Co-editor, ACM CSCW’23, Program Co-chair, ACM Multimedia’24).