October, 2026: Sam is presenting a poster at CSCW focusing on clinician-AI collaboration.
October, 2026: Saeed co-organized a panel at AACP Un-Convention on financial challenges in mental health.
October, 2026: Sam led a workshop on Human-AI teaming at HCOMP.
October, 2026: Saeed and his co-authors received the UbiComp 10-Year Impact Award (Runner-Up).
June, 2026: Yunkai has a paper accepted in CLPsych (Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology).
May, 2026: Jeff had three submissions accepted to the 28th Annual Conference of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders focused on fintech to support persons with bipolar disorder.
April, 2026: Jeff has received the Exemplary Graduate Student Research Poster award at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health Research Conference, Penn State College of Medicine. Congrats, Jeff 👏🏾👏🏾
April, 2026: Bhavika has won Best Poster award at the College of Engineering Research Symposium. Congrats, Bhavika 🎉
April, 2026: Saeed and his co-authors received the Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2026!
October, 2025: Penn State News has an article on student success from our lab!
September, 2025: We have a paper in NeurIPS 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks Track! The thousand voices of trauma paper describes a synthetic benchmark dataset for Prolonged Exposure therapy protocol.
August, 2025: We have two papers in EMNLP! The first paper on evaluating small language models for PTSD support has been accepted for oral presentation. The second paper on synthetic therapy conversations has been accepted for poster presentation.
July, 2025: Hee Jeong has defended her dissertation! She will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) at Dartmouth. Congrats, Dr. Hee Jeong!
June, 2025: Suhas has successfully defended his dissertation! He will be joining Amazon as an Applied scientist. Congrats, Dr. Suhas!
May, 2025: Penn State News highlighted Suhas and his research project.
April, 2025: Suhas received a Best Poster Award at MASC-SLL 2025 (out of 62 posters). He also received 3rd Best Poster Award at Penn State Startup Week (out of 80+ posters)! The project focuses on using generative AI for mental health support.
March, 2025: Ling has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis! He will be joining Meta.
February, 2025: We are organizing a CHI workshop on Future of Money and HCI.
January, 2025: Our team (PI: James Wang) has received an NIH R01 grant focusing on the detection of acute stroke.
December, 2024: Two postdocs are joining our lab! Welcome Dom and Ita!
November, 2024: We have two submissions in AAAI Fall Symposium Series 2024 — AI for Aging in Place. The first paper focuses on supporting financial stability in dementia. The second paper explores voice assistants to support dementia care.
October, 2024: We have published a paper exploring acceptance and feasibility of a conversational agent to support individuals living with PTSD.
August, 2024: Our team (PI: David Conroy) has received an NIH P30 grant to develop principle-driven and scalable digital interventions that promote physical activity and enhance cognitive function.
July, 2024: Sanjana and Sahiti have successfully defended their dissertations! Sanjana will be a postdoc in the MRCAS lab at Harvard Medical School. Sahiti will be a postdoc in the DIGITAL Insights Lab at Yale School of Medicine. Congrats, Drs. Sanjana and Sahiti!!
June, 2024: We have received an NIA R21 grant to create a voice assistant to support dementia care.
May, 2024: Saeed has been awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor!
March, 2024: We have two submissions accepted at CHI 2024! The first paper focuses on supportive financial technology for individuals with bipolar disorder. The second submission is a late-breaking paper on managing finances for persons living with dementia.
January, 2024: We have published a paper exploring how conversational agents might be used in palliative care.
October, 2023: Our paper on using a voice interface to support mindfulness-based stress reduction home practice was accepted in SAGE Digital Health.
September, 2023: We have received an NSF grant to develop AI teammates to support mental health workers. This is a collaboration with Andrew Sherrill, Christopher Wiese, and Rosa Arriaga.
August, 2023: Suhas presented our work on differential privacy to balance accuracy and privacy in speech-based dementia diagnosis at INTERSPEECH 2023.
August, 2023: Our paper on the effects of voice assistant personality on user perceptions of COVID misinformation was accepted in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
July, 2023: Saeed co-organized the “Designing for and Reflecting upon Resilience in Health and Wellbeing” workshop at DIS 2023.
June, 2023: Sahiti and Sanjana have been selected to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC).
June, 2023: Johnna has passed her dissertation defense — congrats Dr. Blair!!
May, 2023: We have received an NIMH R21 grant to assess financial behaviors in bipolar disorder. This project is a collaboration with Erika F. H. Saunders and Dahlia Mukherjee.
May, 2023: Saeed has received the Dean’s Circle of Teaching Excellence award - congrats!
May, 2023: Our paper on using a conversational agent for self-management of PTSD was accepted in JMIR Formative Research.
May, 2023: Sanjana presented our work on using a voice interface to support mindfulness practice for individuals living with chronic pain at the Penn State Consortium for Substance Use (CSUA) Annual Conference.
April, 2023: Sanjana attended the 2023 CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women.
April, 2023: Suhas is joining Samsung this summer as an AI research intern, where he will be working on using novel deep learning/reinforcement learning algorithms on multimodal data streams.
March, 2023: Jeff was awarded the prestigious NSF GRFP - congrats!
March, 2023: Raju will be an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma starting this Fall!
March, 2023: Johnna has received the IST Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching Support - congrats!
February, 2023: Saeed was invited to talk about conversational agents to support health and wellbeing at the SPSP Psychology of Media and Technology preconference.
February, 2023: Ling has passed the comprehensive exam - congrats!
January, 2023: We have two papers accepted at CHI 2023! The first paper focuses on designing preemptive interventions for individuals with bipolar disorder. The second paper aims to improve physical activity among Hispanic users.