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DERI Seminar with Michel Valstar, BlueSkeye AI

When: Thursday, February 23, 2023, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where: zoom

Speaker: Michel Valstar, founding CEO of BlueSkeye AI

Early detection and monitoring of mental health using AI enabled companion apps
Zoom link: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81148100921

Abstract: There is a crisis in mental health in the UK and worldwide. In England there are 8 million people with mental health problems who cannot get specialist help and nearly one billion people worldwide live with a mental disorder. BlueSkeye AI builds face and voice analysis solutions which are ethically driven, scientifically proven, and has individual privacy built in. These solutions will make a real difference in the early detection and monitoring of mental health. The technology is currently undergoing clinical trials for its application to perinatal mental health, and a non-clinical version is already being used by over 150,000 pregnant women in the UK. The underlying technology is made available in three Software Development Kits, B-Healthy for the creation of health-related companion apps, B-Automotive for sensing of health and wellbeing in cars, and B-Social to improve interaction with interactive devices. This talk will give an overview of the science behind the technology, the ongoing clinical trial, as well as the ways it is made available to customers and academics.

Bio:  Prof Michel Valstar is a visionary scientist the founding CEO of BlueSkeye AI, a seed-stage start-up company founded in 2019 that uses face and voice analysis to make everyone’s quality of life better tomorrow than it is today. BlueSkeye AI creates clinical grade software that is licensed to the digital health & wellbeing and the automotive industry, with an ongoing clinical trial to recognise perinatal mental health issues.  In addition to leading BlueSkeye, Michel Valstar is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham. He founded BlueSkeye AI in April 2019 to create social good from the research conducted in his Automatic Human Behaviour Understanding Laboratory. He received his masters' degree in Electrical Engineering at Delft University of Technology in 2005 and his PhD in computer science at Imperial College London in 2008, and was a Visiting Researcher at MIT's  Media Lab in 2011. He is a thought leader in the fields of computer vision and pattern recognition, where his main interest is in automatic recognition of human behaviour, specialising in the analysis of facial expressions. He founded the  facial expression recognition challenges (FERA 2011/2015/2017), and the Audio-Visual Emotion recognition Challenge series (AVEC 2011-2019). He was the coordinator of the EU Horizon2020 project ARIA-VALUSPA, which will build the next generation virtual humans, deputy director of the £6M Biomedical Research Centre's Mental Health and Technology theme, and recipient of Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation funding to help premature babies survive in the developing world, which won the FG 2017 best paper award. His work has received popular press coverage in, among others,  Science Magazine, The Guardian, New Scientist and on BBC Radio. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers at venues including PAMI, CVPR, ICCV, SMC-Cybernetics, and Transactions on Affective Computing (h-index 48, >15,000 citations).

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