https://digimindlab.ai/Recent content on DigiMind LabHugoenhttps://digimindlab.ai/people/smokey/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/smokey/Smokey Zampottino is the lab’s official mascot. Before joining the team, he graduated from the ACC Manhattan Shelter. His research interests include emotion dysregulation during work hours and maximizing treats.https://digimindlab.ai/people/adam/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/adam/Adam Chang is a graduate student in Urban Data Science at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, specializing in machine learning methods in healthcare settings. He holds a Bachelors degree in Applied Psychology also from NYU and has worked in both clinical and computational capacities within the fields of Psychology and Psychiatry. He holds a specific interest in Machine Learning Applications within clinical and public health settings, with current research investigating how geospatial and location-aware digital therapeutics can enhance patient outcomes and clinical workflows.https://digimindlab.ai/people/em/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/em/Emily Whitney is a Software Engineer and post-baccalaureate psychology student at Hunter College. She volunteers with Crisis Text Line and is interested in scalable mental health interventions and ways computation can aid the therapeutic process. Prior to her software career, she graduated from Johns Hopkins University with degrees in Economics and Writing Seminars. In her free time she enjoys reading, writing, and traveling to new places.https://digimindlab.ai/people/xinran/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/xinran/Xinran Gao is a master’s student in Psychology at New York University, working with Dr. Matteo Malgaroli on her master’s thesis. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Economics from McGill University, where she studied the use of cursor-tracking methods to improve self-report measures. With interests in clinical psychology and computational approaches, she is currently examining how language models can be used to evaluate linguistic markers of mental health functioning.https://digimindlab.ai/people/zoe/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/zoe/Zoë Mermin is a Research Data Associate at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, affiliated with the DigiMind Lab and the Anxiety, Stress & Prolonged Grief Program, where she coordinates studies related to treatments for anxiety disorders and the detection of anxiety and depression. In her free time, she enjoys teaching cycling, baking, and hiking.https://digimindlab.ai/people/nikita/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/nikita/Nikita Soni is an incoming postdoctoral fellow in the DigiMind Lab. She has 16 peer-reviewed publications spanning ACL, npj digital medicine, JPSP, WASSA, and CLPsych. She also led the workshop Human-Centered Large Language Modeling (co-founded with the 1st edition at ACL 2024), and she’s leading a SemEval-2026 shared task on Predicting Variation in Emotional Affect (at ACL/EMNLP 2026). Her research focuses on integrating the author’s context into language modeling to build human-context-aware models that can be useful in multiple domains, such as mental health.https://digimindlab.ai/people/julia/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/julia/Julia received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from York University in Toronto, Canada. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Anxiety, Stress, and Prolonged Grief Program at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Her research interests include anxiety, health-related decisions, and decision-making under uncertainty.https://digimindlab.ai/research/digital/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/research/digital/We study telemedicine and other digital delivery methods to provide mental health treatment at scale. Working with digital health stakeholders and real-world samples of more than 10,000 patients, we have found that digital delivery preserves the safety and efficacy of both psychotherapy and pharmacological interventions while expanding access. Because every interaction in these settings is captured through the digital surface, they also let us study therapeutic processes with NLP and language models.https://digimindlab.ai/people/matteo/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/people/matteo/Matteo Malgaroli is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, affiliated with the Computational Psychiatry program and the NYU Center for Data Science. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. A clinical psychologist with AI expertise, he works to improve the scale, quality, and objectivity of mental health interventions using algorithmic solutions, particularly language models. He also studies digital health applications to evaluate real-world deployment, enable large-scale patient data collection, and expand access to care.https://digimindlab.ai/research/computational/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/research/computational/We develop machine learning methods that move beyond diagnostic categories to characterize how symptoms are organized and how they change over time. This includes VISTA-SSM, our clustering method for noisy, irregular, and incomplete longitudinal data, and trajectory modeling that identifies distinct courses of adjustment to stress, loss, and treatment and the predictors that distinguish them. We also use network analysis to map relationships among symptoms and, most recently, to characterize the temporal dynamics of patient emotions turn by turn in psychotherapy samples of over thirty thousand patients.https://digimindlab.ai/research/human-ai/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/research/human-ai/As conversational AI enters mental health care, we examine how people interact with it. We test whether language model responses are perceived as empathic and supportive, analyze tens of thousands of real conversations between users and AI to characterize safety-relevant behavior, and study engagement and outcomes when generative AI is deployed for social and mental health support. We also build adversarial user simulations that expose how systems fail, so that these interactions can be evaluated and improved before and during deployment.https://digimindlab.ai/research/llms/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/research/llms/We study the empirical and regulatory foundations needed to deploy large language models (LLMs) safely in mental health care. We conducted among the first real-world evaluations of a conversational AI agent built for anxiety and depression, and we design simulated patients to stress-test conversational systems before they reach people. To guide development, we authored a research framework for LLM-based interventions and an implementation framework covering regulatory considerations, ethical safeguards, and deployment barriers specific to mental health.https://digimindlab.ai/research/nlp/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/research/nlp/We build natural language processing (NLP) tools for scalable, objective mental health monitoring, so that care no longer depends only on infrequent self-report. We proposed a research framework that maps NLP intervention targets, evidence gaps, and methodological standards, and we conducted the first evaluation of large language models’ ability to measure psychiatric functioning. We identify linguistic, acoustic, and emotional markers in communication between patients and clinicians that track symptoms and predict treatment outcomes, enabling passive monitoring at scale.https://digimindlab.ai/news/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://digimindlab.ai/news/