How Should Digital Assistants Help People in Crisis: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of AI and Mental Health
No RSVP required for current Princeton faculty, staff, and students. Open to members of the public by invitation only. Please contact Jean Butcher at butcher (@princeton.edu) if you are interested in attending a particular lunch.
Digital assistants (e.g. Siri on the iPhone, Microsoft’s Cortana) are offering to help with driving directions, ordering food, and other daily activities. What should they say if a user asks about suicide or other health crises? As talking software plays a larger part in daily life, and interacts with vulnerable populations (e.g. youth), competence and privacy need to be proactively addressed. This talk focuses on the social, technical, and policy opportunities for conversational AI to recognize and respond to health crises.
Dr. Miner is an AI psychologist, whose research addresses policy issues in the use, design, and regulation of conversational AI in health. In service to improving access to high quality mental health care, Dr. Miner’s research and collaborations focus on allowing digital assistants to recognize, respect, and respond to health issues through controlled and naturalistic studies.
Dr. Miner is an instructor in Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and KL2 fellow in epidemiology and clinical research, with active collaborations in computer science, biomedical informatics, and communication. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC), using human-centered design to create new models of health care delivery to safely reduce national health spending and improve access to care. He obtained his doctorate in clinical psychology from the PGSP-Stanford Psy.D. Consortium.
Dr. Miner has provided mental health services at Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry, Stanford’s Chronic Pain Clinic, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the San Francisco jail system. His research has been featured on NPR, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, ABC, and The Onion.
