Claire Gillan and Marcus Collier: AI & Mental Health

Our health is one of our greatest assets, and it has many interconnected parts, including our mental health and the environment in which we live. How can artificial intelligence enable us to engage more with our mental health and environment, and help researchers better understand how to protect both?

Helping us discover the answers is Claire Gillan, whose lab is developing new approaches to studying brain health, and Marcus Collier (TCD) whose research explores the complex interface between social and ecological systems in informal wild spaces in cities.

TOPICS WE DISCUSSED INCLUDE

(01.08) How technology such as mobile apps can encourage a broader diversity of people to take part in psychology research in their ‘real lives’, not just in the lab

(05.03) Many plants grow wild in cities, but we probably don’t pay much attention to them or the spaces in which they grow

(10.04) If you want people to use technology to contribute their data to science, you need to think carefully about how to engage with and protect them

(12.51) Artificial intelligence is helping psychology research to better predict what treatments would work best for people

(17.25) Artificial intelligence can help more people tell researchers what they think about the environment, so we hear more voices and perspectives

(23.28) AI might be part of the solution to help people with mental health issues – at the moment there just are not enough human therapists, so might a ‘chat bot’ style of interaction help?

(26.14) Our guests Marcus and Claire make plans to discuss working together.

GUEST DETAILS

Professor Claire Gillan is an Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin, where her lab is interested in developing new approaches to studying brain health in psychiatric and ageing populations – a key goal is to develop objective tests that can be used to diagnose individuals and predict who will respond to which treatment. Her longitudinal, smartphone-based research (www.neureka.ie) in dementia and mental health is supported by funding from the Global Brain Health Institute, and Science Foundation Ireland, and she was awarded an ERC starting grant for €1.5M in 2020 to address gaps in our current understanding of how we make and break habits.

www.gillanlab.com
Twitter: @clairegillanTCD

Professor Marcus Collier is an Associate Professor of Sustainability Science in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin and a Principal Investigator with ADAPT. His research explores the complex interface between social and ecological systems in informal wild spaces in cities, and the potential of nature-based solutions in an urbanising world. He was the lead investigator of the EU-funded projects Connecting Nature from 2017 to 2022 and the TURAS project from 2011 to 2016, for which he received a Champions of European Research Award. In 2020, Marcus was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Consolidator grant for NovelEco, a citizen science project.

naturalscience.tcd.ie/people/COLLIEMA
noveleco.eu/team-member/dr-marcus-collier/
www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-collier-12a0417/
Twitter: @marcus_collier