Big data for better science: technologies for measuring behaviour

Susan Murphy is a Professor of Statistics, Computer Science and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Harvard University. Dr Murphy’s lab develops data analysis methods and experimental designs to improve real time sequential decision-making in mobile health, in particular algorithms that can be deployed on wearable devices, to deliver individually tailored treatments. Her lab developed the micro-randomized trial for use in developing mobile health interventions; this trial design is in use across a broad range of health related areas. In these trials each participant can be randomized or re-randomized 100’s of times. Dr Murphy is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Medicine, both of the US National Academies. In 2013 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her work on experimental designs to inform sequential decision making.

Julia Hoffman has spent a decade leading the development of novel technology-based tools for Veterans and Service Members with mental health conditions. She has worked as Mobile Apps Lead, Gaming Lead, Subject Matter Expert, evaluator, researcher, poly-writer, and, most recently, National Director of Mobile Health for the US Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Mental Health Services. Julia has been the most prolific developer of federal government apps, producing more than 25 widely used apps for mental health. Julia additionally is Founder and CEO of BehaviorDx, a consulting company that assists in the translation of psychological science and behavioural medicine for various technology platforms.

Robert E Kraut (PhD, 1973, Yale University) is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction (Emeritus) at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a social psychologist with broad research interests in the impact of computing and telecommunications on individuals, groups and organisations and ways to design them to improve human lives. He has conducted empirical research on online communities, the social impact of the Internet, the design of information technology for small-group intellectual work and related topics. Starting with his HomeNet project, he has spent over 20 years conducting research to understand how people’s use of information technology influence their psychological well-being and personal relationships. His research on online communities combines careful empirical studies of communities with interventions and design ideas to improve them. This approach is illustrated in his book with Paul Resnick, Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design.

Dr Chen is a manager and research scientist at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, NY. Her team develops and tests technology-enabled approaches to understanding health behaviour and patient decision-making. She is investigating methods for increasing the speed and accuracy with which practitioners can personalise interventions for health behaviour modification. To this end, she is interested in quantifying health behaviour and patient experience through the analysis of various types of temporal data (eg, medical/health records, social platforms, wearable devices, IoT sensors). She has a dual-title PhD in business administration and operations research from Penn State University and a bachelors degree in Nursing from the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Daniel Freeman is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and a NIHR Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of University College Oxford and a consultant clinical psychologist in Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. He is also a co-founder of Oxford VR, a University of Oxford spin-out company. He has published extensively on the psychological understanding and treatment of mental health disorders, especially paranoia. For over fifteen years he has been using virtual reality to assess, understand, and treat mental health disorders.

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New York City. She is founder of the Health Tech Hub in the Jacobs Institute and directs the Small Data Lab at Cornell Tech. She holds The Robert V. Tishman Founder's Chair and has taken on a leadership role as Associate Dean. Her current research focus is on mobile health and small data, leveraging the pervasiveness of mobile devices and digital interactions for health and life management (TEDMED). Estrin co-founded the non-profit startup, Open mHealth and sits on several scientific advisory boards for early stage mobile health startups.

Previously, Estrin was on the UCLA faculty where she was the Founding Director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), pioneering the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyse real time data about the physical world. Her honours include: ACM Athena Lecture (2006), Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation (2007), The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), The National Academy of Engineering (2009), The IEEE Internet Award (2017).

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.

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.