MSA 2024: The first International Workshop on Multimodal Social Agents & Robots for Mental Health and Wellbeing – A new world with foundation models at ACII 2024

Every day, hundreds of millions of people go to bed anxious, depressed, unhappy, with no peace of mind or knowing what to do tomorrow to make their lives better. Human-like conversational AI agents with affect sensing capabilities can revolutionise digital mental health and wellbeing solutions. Multimodal agents that can interact through face, voice and natural language are essential to mimic human-human-like interactions. The advent of vision-language Foundation models such as GPT and DALL.E has dramatically transformed human-AI interaction. Coupled with large language foundation models, Social agents and robots equipped with multimodal affective interactions, have the potential to enable novel approaches to assess mental health conditions such as clinical depression and anxiety.

The MSA-2024 workshop jointly organised with BLUESKEYE AI at ACII-2024 conference in Glasgow, aims to explore applications of cutting-edge Multimodal Social Agents and Robots to Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing solutions, providing a platform for researchers working on mental health technologies to network, share ideas and best practices and explore new opportunities and potential solutions to current challenges.

Organisers

• Joy Egede, Assistant Professor at University of Nottingham

• Mani Tellamekala, Head of R&D at BLUESKEYE AI

• Michel Valstar, Chief Evangelist and Scientific Officer at BLUESKEYE AI

• Nick Cummins, Lecturer at King’s College London

• Prof Pierre Philip, Université de Bordeaux

• Sharon Mozgai, University of Southern California

Prof. Philip is a psychiatrist by training and member of the CNRS Service and Research Unit "Sleep, Attention and NeuroPSYchiatrie" (USR6033 - SANPSY). Pr Philip has a large experience in clinical research and is Director of the Neuro-Psychopharmacological Research Platform and coordinator of PEPR research program AUTONOM-HEALTH dedicated to the development of embodied conversational agents used in the field of sleep and mental health. He is currently coordinator of the Sleep Research Group (GDR CNRS 3737) and scientific advisor for the CNRS (INSB). Since July 2020 he is head of the university department of sleep medicine in The University Hospital of Bordeaux.

9.00 - 09.10am:

• Welcome and opening remarks 

• Title: Autonomous Virtual Agents and Sleep Health

• Management: A Clinical and Populational approach

• Prof Pierre Philip, Université de Bordeaux

09.10 - 10.00am:

• Keynote talk (40mins talk,10mins Q&A)

10.00 - 10.30am:

• Oral Session 1: Social Agents & Robots for Mental Health and Wellbeing (12mins presentation +3mins Q&A per paper)

• Paper 1: Enhancing Patient Intake Process in Mental Health Consultations Using RAG-Driven Chatbot

• Paper 2: Learning Graph Representation for Predicting Student Mental Wellbeing in Robot Assisted Journal Writing Context
  

10.30 - 11.00am:

• Tea break

11.00 - 11.45am:

• Oral Session 2: Inclusive Affective Technologies for Mental Health and Wellbeing (12mins presentation +3mins Q&A per paper)

• Paper 3: Multimodal Gender Fairness in Depression Prediction: Insights on Data from USA & China

• Paper 4: Driver Monitoring Systems in Automated Vehicles for the Older Population

• Paper 5: Acoustic Characterization of Huntington’s Disease Emotional Expression: An Explainable AI Approach12.30 – 13.30:

• Lunch

11.00 - 11.45am:

• Oral Session 2: Inclusive Affective Technologies for Mental Health and Wellbeing (12mins presentation +3mins Q&A per paper)

• Paper 3: Multimodal Gender Fairness in Depression Prediction: Insights on Data from USA & China

• Paper 4: Driver Monitoring Systems in Automated Vehicles for the Older Population

• Paper 5: Acoustic Characterization of Huntington’s Disease Emotional Expression: An Explainable AI Approach

11.45 - 12.30:

• Prize presentation and closing