Big data for better science: technologies for measuring behaviour

Mental health disorders are very common, often with great personal and societal costs, but far too few people receive the best treatments. The case will be made that much greater access to the best psychological treatments can be achieved using automated delivery in virtual reality (VR). With virtual reality simulations, individuals can repeatedly experience their problematic situations and be taught, via evidence-based psychological treatments delivered by a virtual coach, how to overcome difficulties. A key advantage of VR is that individuals know that a computer environment is not real but their minds and bodies behave as if it is real; hence, people will much more easily face difficult situations in VR than in real life and be able to try out new therapeutic strategies. VR treatments can also be made much more engaging and appealing for patients than traditional therapies. A systematic programme of work developing and testing automated VR psychological treatments for conditions such as fear of heights, social anxiety, and schizophrenia will be described.

Professor Daniel Freeman, University of Oxford, UK

Professor Daniel Freeman, University of Oxford, UK

Daniel Freeman is an NIHR Research Professor, Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, a consultant clinical psychologist in Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, a fellow of University College Oxford, and leads the Oxford Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis (O-CAP) research group at the University of Oxford. Daniel has been working with virtual reality (VR) since 2001 and is a co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Oxford VR, a University of Oxford spinout company.

Confirmed exhibitors include:

BIOPAC: BIOPAC provides high-quality scientific tools for physiology measurement and interpretation with world-class customer service and support. BIOPAC systems facilitate discovery in ambulatory, MRI, lab, real-world, and virtual environments, enabling recording and analysis of a wide range of signals, and are easily integrated with a variety of equipment such as eye trackers, VR, video monitoring and stimulus presentation. With over 20,000 citations in scholarly and scientific publications, BIOPAC systems are found in premier laboratories, research facilities, and corporations world-wide.

Cambridge Cognition: CANTAB Connect Research is the world’s most validated, precise and reliable research software providing sensitive digital measures of cognitive function for all areas of brain research. Delivering leading neuroscience through our secure cloud platform, CANTAB Connect Research is an efficient and easy-to-use system providing insights into behaviours, underlying brain circuits and neurochemical systems and measurement of digital cognitive biomarkers.

Coelition: Coelition is an independent non-profit that supports research and innovation with behavioural data. Our open standard contains a detailed and extensive taxonomy of human behaviour allowing any human to be coded with full semantic harmonisation and data portability. We provide technical infrastructure and governance frameworks for organisations, helping them to deliver programmes and services that handle data responsibly.

FF Foundation (Open Doors Ltd): Maurice Flynn FRSA Director of Data Science will present Today's Narrow AI for Big Data Analysis - our toolset that brings the power of narrow AI data analysis to everyone. 

MagVenture: MagVenture's mission is to be the most dynamic and innovative supplier of transcranial magnetic stimulation solutions.Within research, MagVenture is widely known and recognised for our MagPro product line, one of the most powerful, advanced and durable TMS solutions on the market – tailored to not only suit the current needs of researchers, but also let them push the field of neuroscience and thus shape the future path of TMS.

PSYT: At PSYT we believe that large-scale, positive change begins with improving the wellbeing of individuals. We collaborate with leading academics at the forefront of research, providing innovative technology that allows them to use state-of-the-art research designs to capture data. With expertise across psychology and technology, we can help researchers create digital products to collect big, accurate, ecologically-valid data in real-time. The scalability of our apps increases the statistical power of studies, helping researchers uncover reliable relationships and create greater social impact.

PsychoPy: PsychoPy is an open-source application allowing easy, precise, extremely flexible experiments in the behavioural sciences. It supports a wide range of stimuli that can be changed on every screen refresh and can be run either in a lab-based setting or online. Also presenting... Pavlovia.org - a new site to allow sharing, exploring, and launching studies created in PsychoPy, jsPsych or lab.js.

Rogue Resolutions: Rogue Resolutions believes in the importance of developing and maintaining strong links between industry and academia within the field of neuroscience and brain research. We particularly specialise in non-invasive brain stimulation and brain imaging, supporting a broad range of solutions that are ideally suited to meet the complex requirements of research applications.

Testable: Testable is a one-stop platform for behavioural experiments, surveys, and data collection, trusted by 3000+ researchers from 80+ leading universities. We offer the only software allowing the creation of psychology experiments without coding or use of a complicated graphical interface. Hands down, the fastest way from experimental idea to implementation, with even complex designs such as staircases and multiplayer environments often requiring less than five minutes to set up. Our solution is powerful and flexible, covering a wide range of experimental designs, fully customisable. Testable experiments and surveys run in any browser, online and offline. Our subject pool, Testable Minds, offers high-quality data through a state-of-the-art verification system, guaranteeing that our participants are human, unique, reliable, and with verified age, sex, and location. All Testable products and features are overseen by a reputable team of academic advisors. Most scientists agree: it should be Testable!

How do children acquire a language? Decades of work have provided a roadmap of principles and mechanisms for early language learning as attested by small-scale laboratory tasks. But there is not yet a convincing empirical synthesis of this work that addresses both the systematicity and ubiquity of language learning and the variability of learning trajectories across children. This talk describes some initial steps towards such a synthesis, integrating high-density data from individual children learning a single language and summary data from tens of thousands of children learning more than a dozen languages. Taken together, the data support a hybrid picture in which children slowly accumulate knowledge in rich social contexts but also show evidence for surprisingly fast grammatical abstractions. 

Dr Michael C Frank, Stanford University, USA

Dr Michael C Frank, Stanford University, USA

Michael C Frank is Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He earned his BS from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems in 2005 and his PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010. He studies both adults' language use and children's language learning and how both of these interact with social cognition. His work uses behavioural experiments, computational tools, and novel measurement methods including large-scale web-based studies, eye-tracking, and head-mounted cameras. He has been recognised as a 'rising star' by the Association for Psychological Science. His dissertation received the Glushko Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and he is recipient of the FABBS Early Career Impact award and the Klaus W. Jacobs Advanced Research Fellowship. He has served as Associate Editor for the journal Cognition, member and chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, and was a founding Executive Committee member of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.

Commodity devices people carry with them during their day are equipped with a range of sensors able to detect very fine-grained behaviour features. The talk will illustrate a number of examples of applications where devices have been used in the context of health and behaviour tracking, which include mental health studies and emotion recognition, Alzheimer’s diagnostics, medical adherence and smoke cessation. A number of sensor techniques will be presented and the talk will discuss their accuracy and limitations. The presentation will continue by discussing the challenges which the application of these technologies bring with them when applied to mobile health and diagnostics, including device efficiency and privacy.

Professor Cecilia Mascolo, University of Cambridge, UK

Professor Cecilia Mascolo, University of Cambridge, UK

Cecilia Mascolo is the mother of a teenage daughter. She is also a Professor of Mobile Systems in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge where she is Director of the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence. Prior joining Cambridge in 2008, she has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. She holds a PhD and an MSc degree from the University of Bologna. She specialises in optimising mobile phone applications and understanding behaviour from mobile phone sensors. Her wider research interests are in human mobility modelling, mobile and sensor systems and data analytics. She has published in a number of top tier conferences and journals in the area and her investigator experience spans more than twenty projects funded by EPSRC, MRC, EU, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung. She has served as organizing and programme committee member of over fifty mobile, sensor systems and networking conferences and workshops. She has sat on the editorial boards of IEEE Internet Computing, Pervasive Computing, Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.

Confirmed exhibitors include:

BIOPAC: BIOPAC provides high-quality scientific tools for physiology measurement and interpretation with world-class customer service and support. BIOPAC systems facilitate discovery in ambulatory, MRI, lab, real-world, and virtual environments, enabling recording and analysis of a wide range of signals, and are easily integrated with a variety of equipment such as eye trackers, VR, video monitoring and stimulus presentation. With over 20,000 citations in scholarly and scientific publications, BIOPAC systems are found in premier laboratories, research facilities, and corporations world-wide.

Cambridge Cognition: CANTAB Connect Research is the world’s most validated, precise and reliable research software providing sensitive digital measures of cognitive function for all areas of brain research. Delivering leading neuroscience through our secure cloud platform, CANTAB Connect Research is an efficient and easy-to-use system providing insights into behaviours, underlying brain circuits and neurochemical systems and measurement of digital cognitive biomarkers.

Coelition: Coelition is an independent non-profit that supports research and innovation with behavioural data. Our open standard contains a detailed and extensive taxonomy of human behaviour allowing any human to be coded with full semantic harmonisation and data portability. We provide technical infrastructure and governance frameworks for organisations, helping them to deliver programmes and services that handle data responsibly.

FF Foundation (Open Doors Ltd): Maurice Flynn FRSA Director of Data Science will present Today's Narrow AI for Big Data Analysis - our toolset that brings the power of narrow AI data analysis to everyone. 

MagVenture: MagVenture's mission is to be the most dynamic and innovative supplier of transcranial magnetic stimulation solutions.Within research, MagVenture is widely known and recognised for our MagPro product line, one of the most powerful, advanced and durable TMS solutions on the market – tailored to not only suit the current needs of researchers, but also let them push the field of neuroscience and thus shape the future path of TMS.

PSYT: At PSYT we believe that large-scale, positive change begins with improving the wellbeing of individuals. We collaborate with leading academics at the forefront of research, providing innovative technology that allows them to use state-of-the-art research designs to capture data. With expertise across psychology and technology, we can help researchers create digital products to collect big, accurate, ecologically-valid data in real-time. The scalability of our apps increases the statistical power of studies, helping researchers uncover reliable relationships and create greater social impact.

PsychoPy: PsychoPy is an open-source application allowing easy, precise, extremely flexible experiments in the behavioural sciences. It supports a wide range of stimuli that can be changed on every screen refresh and can be run either in a lab-based setting or online. Also presenting... Pavlovia.org - a new site to allow sharing, exploring, and launching studies created in PsychoPy, jsPsych or lab.js.

Rogue Resolutions: Rogue Resolutions believes in the importance of developing and maintaining strong links between industry and academia within the field of neuroscience and brain research. We particularly specialise in non-invasive brain stimulation and brain imaging, supporting a broad range of solutions that are ideally suited to meet the complex requirements of research applications.

Testable: Testable is a one-stop platform for behavioural experiments, surveys, and data collection, trusted by 3000+ researchers from 80+ leading universities. We offer the only software allowing the creation of psychology experiments without coding or use of a complicated graphical interface. Hands down, the fastest way from experimental idea to implementation, with even complex designs such as staircases and multiplayer environments often requiring less than five minutes to set up. Our solution is powerful and flexible, covering a wide range of experimental designs, fully customisable. Testable experiments and surveys run in any browser, online and offline. Our subject pool, Testable Minds, offers high-quality data through a state-of-the-art verification system, guaranteeing that our participants are human, unique, reliable, and with verified age, sex, and location. All Testable products and features are overseen by a reputable team of academic advisors. Most scientists agree: it should be Testable!