The 90's saw an explosion of ideas in merging traditional signal processing techniques
with personal communication and entertainment supported by www technologies. We are presently
experiencing yet another paradigm change in human interaction and communication such as
through social media and in online information sharing. Notably, there has been significant
movement in employing information and communications technologies towards transforming access
and participation of people in their health and well-being.
This exciting convergence of signal processing, multimedia, and speech applications centered on
novel processing of signals from, to, and for humans, is the focus of my research. This effort entails
a range of challenges in the sensing, recognition, interpretation, and context exploitation of complex
human behavior, both at the explicit and implicit levels. Importantly, the effort includes the creation
of algorithms and models that are inspired by, and emulate, how humans make use of the behavioral
signal information in specific, societally-meaningful application settings.
In this talk, I will focus on one aspect of my work, Behavioral Signal Processing — technology
and algorithms for quantitatively and objectively understanding typical, atypical and distressed
human behavior — for mental health care, especially in the domain of Family Studies but also in the
domain of Addiction. I will discuss how we exploit both existing data and pursue new multimodal
data acquisition approaches