Jim Rehg
Talk: Social AI and its Role in Diagnosing and Treating Autism
Beginning in infancy, individuals acquire the social and communication skills that are vital for a healthy and productive life. Children with autism face great challenges in acquiring these skills, resulting in substantial lifetime risks. As the neural basis for ASD is unclear, the diagnosis, treatment, and study of autism depends fundamentally on the analysis of child social behavior. In this talk I will describe our research program in developing AI models that are capable of understanding social interactions from audio-video recordings, and their use in providing objective measures of child social behaviors in naturalistic contexts.
BIO:
James M. Rehg is a Founder Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC, where he is.the Director of the Health Care Engineering Systems Center. He received his Ph.D. from CMU in 1995 and worked at the Cambridge Research Lab of DEC (and then Compaq) from 1995-2001, where he managed the computer vision research group. He was a professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech from 2001-2022. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2001 and a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship from Georgia Tech in 2005. He and his students have received best student paper awards at ICML 2005, BMVC 2010 and 2022, Mobihealth 2014, and Face and Gesture 2015, and a Method of the Year Award from the journal Nature Methods. Dr. Rehg served as the Program co-Chair for ACCV 2012 and CVPR 2017 and General co-Chair for CVPR 2009. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and holds 30 issued US patents. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning, and mobile and computational health (https://rehg.org). Dr. Rehg was the lead PI on an NSF Expedition to develop the science and technology of Behavioral Imaging, the measurement and analysis of social and communicative behavior using multi-modal sensing, with applications to developmental conditions such as autism. He is currently the Deputy Director and TR&D1 Lead for the mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization, and Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (mDOT), which is developing novel on-body sensing and predictive analytics for improving health outcomes (https://mdot.md2k.org/)