Happy Valentines Day!

Dr. Kristy Hollingshead Seitz chats with SPSM about the love match between data science and mental health, 2/14/16, 9pCT.

Watch her stream LIVE, and see how #CLPsych has the ability to showcase research at the intersection of computational linguistics and mental health. If you are in love with innovation, this is the #SPSM for you:

Update: Here is the Storify Summary of the Chat.

Join us to talk about why mental health research needs big data, why data scientists need you, subject matter experts, and how #CLPsych (Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology – www.CLPsych.org) is working to bridge the gap between data science and mental health research.

Dr. Kristy Hollingshead is a Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC – @TheIHMC), building computer models of everyday language — what we say and how we say it — as a signal of our own mental and neurological health. At IHMC, she has been working with the Tampa VA to analyze speech recordings from Veterans with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to automatically detect and track the degradation of speech associated with different stages of ALS. Kristy is also working to correlate changes in speech and language with other neurological disorders like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and traumatic brain injuries. Her recent work with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft, and Qntfy analyzed the language of social media to identify mental health conditions such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia. Kristy’s research is centered on identifying linguistic indicators of mental and neurological health, which can be automatically obtained, analyzed, and potentially used to aid clinical diagnosticians in the assessment and treatment of patients with mental and neurological disorders, to improve their quality of life

Kristy joined IHMC from the Department of Defense, where she worked on analytics for deep understanding of large collections of text, to include combination of evidence, probabilistic knowledge bases, changepoint detection, and sentiment analysis. Prior to that position, she held a postdoc at the University of Maryland in College Park, working with Dr. Philip Resnik (@psresnik), working to improve automatic translation of text from Arabic and Chinese into English, much like you might see now on Google Translate. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), and her B.A. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Kristy readily admits to being both a scientist and a bookworm, and loves her field of study because it is the “science of language.”