Intended Audience
The Department of Psychology welcomes Dr. Brenda Curtis as the first speaker in its 2019-2020 Lecture Series: The Psychology of the Opiod Crisis. She will present on:
"Machine Learning, Digital Phenotyping & Innovative Addiction Intervention"
Dr. Curtis conducts translational research that leverages social media and big data methodologies to form the development, evaluation, and implementation of technology-based tools that address substance us and related conditions such as HIV/AIDS. Her research projects include creating a real-time relapse prevention smartphone application, developing social media-language algorithms to identify relapse risks, and utilizing social media surveillance to assess excessive alcohol consumption to predict opioid use, overdoes rates, and treatment need from social media language that is geo-mapped.
Dr. Curtis will discuss recent research findings on the use of machine learning and digital phenotyping on predicting risks of relapse and treatment outcomes. Using both a theory and data driven approach, she will discuss the insights gained from such approaches. In addition, Dr. Curtis will discuss three key areas of her research: (1) using unobtrusive data collection techniques that predict relapse; (2) determining the value of using online language and data generated from passive digital sources to predict relapse compared to that of traditional predictor scales/models; and (3) formally testing the generality of passive digital data as a relapse predictor across multiple substances.
Dr. Curtis earned both a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in public health from the University of Illinois and subsequently obtained her doctorate in communication from the University of Pennsylvania, where she most recently held the appointment of Assistant Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, Addictions at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Free and open to the public.
This event may be used to satisfy the Lecture Reflection Requirement in PSYC303, PSYC490 and PSYC493/494.