Keynote du LIG - Alessandro Vinciarelli | LIG

Thursday, January 15th, 2026

Is there a role for AI in psychiatry?

Abstract
The goal of this talk is to show that Artificial Intelligence can help psychiatrists to avoid the most tedious and repetitive aspects of their work, thus saving time and energy for the most rewarding aspects of clinical practice. The underlying assumption of the talk is that mental health issues leave physical, machine detectable traces in the behaviour of people, especially when it comes to language (what people say) and paralanguage (how they say it). Therefore, machines can automatically detect such traces and infer from them possible pathologies with the help of AI. Two use cases – detection of depression in adults and identification of insecure attachment in children – will serve as a basis to highlight risks and opportunities in the relationship between AI and psychiatry, from the lack of explainability in state-of-the-art AI methodologies to the possibility of performing large-scale screenings of the population. A discussion on how to bridge the gap between AI and its users (especially in settings relevant to mental health) will conclude the talk.

Biography
Alessandro Vinciarelli (http://vinciarelli.net) is Full Professor at the University of Glasgow, where he is with the School of Computing Science and the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. His main research interest is Social AI, the domain aimed at modelling, analysis and synthesis of verbal and nonverbal behaviour in human-human and human-machine interactions. He published 200+ works in international journals and conferences and he is or has been Principal Investigator in 15+ projects, including an EU funded European Network of Excellence (the SSPNet, 2009-2014, 6.2MEuros) and the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents (2019-2027, 6MEuros, http://socialcdt.org). Alessandro co-organized 30+ international events as General Chair (IEEE International Conference on Social Computing 2012, ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2017, International Conference on Digital mental Health and Wellbeing 2026, etc.), Program Chair (ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2023, Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction 2024) or other roles. In addition, Alessandro is co-founder of Klewel (http://klewel.com), a knowledge management company recognised by the IEEE as an exemplary impact story, and scientific advisor to Substrata (http://substrata.me), a leading Social Signal Processing company.

Date and place

Thursday, January 15th at 14:00
Seminary room, IMAG Building

Speacker

Alessandro Vinciarelli
University of Glasgow
https://vinciarelli.net/