At psicobōtica we have a scientific vocation and we want to involve all interested people in our research projects. No need to be a scientist to participate, this is citizen science!
Citizen science consists of including the active participation of the non-specialized public together with scientists and professionals. Anyone with a vocation to collaborate in an investigation can thus contribute to its development.
Our research lines revolve around cognitive neuroscience, which is the confluence of three scientific disciplines:
- Neuroscience.
- Psychology.
- Artificial intelligence.
In addition to having experts in each of these areas, our research projects require the collaboration of non-specialized people, but who have an interest in these areas and the discoveries or advances that may be obtained. In exchange for their collaboration, these people gain privileged access to the research results, learn more about their topic of interest, and even discover new things about themselves.
In particular, many of our projects use machine learning algorithms that require proper supervision to function properly. That is to say, this type of Artificial Intelligence algorithms need, like young children, someone to guide them initially, to indicate what is right and what is wrong: a human supervisor.
The interesting thing about machine learning algorithms is that, after receiving the necessary supervision from humans, they are able to perform the assigned task automatically, which usually involves detecting specific patterns in the data they process.
In our case, the data we use to “feed” these Artificial Intelligence algorithms are related to psychological content. We are especially interested in detecting patterns related to psychological variables, such as the presence of certain personality traits, anxiety, depression, abuse, or even suicide risk.
Thanks to advances in Artificial Intelligence, we can automatically analyze content such as text, audio, images, sensor data, etc. and to determine whether a pattern compatible with any given psychological phenomenon appears in these data. This is of great value in mental health care, since the early detection of certain problems supposes a better prognosis and a faster recovery.
For this type of research to be successful and to develop automatic intelligent systems, we need a large amount of correctly labeled data. For example:
If we wanted an algorithm to be able to detect depression through language analysis, we’d need thousands of texts written by people with and without depression. In this way, the algorithm will be able to use all that information to learn the linguistic pattern associated with depressed mood.
If you want to collaborate in any of our research projects, you can take a look at the citizen science initiatives that we have launched at psicobōtica labs.
At the same time that you participate in scientific research, you can obtain specific information about your own psychological state, as well as discover what your data says about you. You can also collaborate directly in the training of the Artificial Intelligence systems that we are developing.
Some of the citizen science projects that we propose are the following:
- Train EqualBot, the Artificial Intelligence that detects macho Language. To fight machismo we are building a natural language understanding system capable of detecting macho language. Since this is sometimes a very difficult task, EqualBot needs your help (only available for Spanish language).
- Discover your degree of alexithymia. Alexithymia is the difficulty to identify your own emotions, you will be able to know more about how good you are at that by doing a couple of simple tests:
- Narrative expression with Prolexitim NLP (only Spanish).
- Degree of alexithymia with Prolexitim TAS-20 (only Spanish).
In addition to the results that you can obtain immediately when you take some of the tests, if you leave us your email we will send you more detailed information about the subsequent analysis of your data.