Using Smartphones and Wearables to Understand Bipolar Spectrum Disorder

For the last few years, we have been involved in a project that seeks to use experience sampling data taken from smartphones, wearable devices (FitBits) and surveys to get a better understanding of the time course of Bipolar Spectrum Disorder. The ultimate aim of this research is to be able to predict adverse events and […]

Society for Ambulatory Assessment (SAA) conference

The 2020 Society for Ambulatory Assessment (SAA) conference will be held at the University of Melbourne, Australia from January 15th to 18th, 2020. The SAA 2020 conference aims to bring together scientists from a range of disciplines interested in the use of real-time data capture and experience sampling methodologies, and features keynotes by Professor Nicholas […]

The Design of Private: A Privacy Preserving Probabilistic Language

Increasingly, the human sciences are employing big dense data sets to better characterize biological, psychological and social processes. The models required to capture these processes are becoming sophisticated and compute intensive requiring clusters and distributed data stores to realize. Rather than focus on the development of the models and the interpretation of results, researchers must […]

Interview with Sujai Thomman of the SWARM Project

Originally posted on TerranCraft:
This is a special interview with Sujai Thomman of the SWARM Project. The SWARM Project, based at the University of Melbourne, is using StarCraft II to study collaborative reasoning. About the project The SWARM Project is attempting to achieve fundamental advances in collaborative reasoning. With major funding from the Intelligence Advanced…

StarCraft II players don’t train for 200 years – the limits of current AI

Having conquered games like chess and go, AI researchers are now tackling real time strategy games like Starcraft and Dota. AlphaStar, a product of Google’s DeepMind research labs, has beaten some of the worlds best Starcraft 2 players and Microsoft recently, invested $1 billion in OpenAI and company that has worked on the game Dota […]

The Promise of Big Data Approaches in Memory Research

Most empirical research in psychology either involves administering surveys across a cohort or occurs in the laboratory. While a great deal has been learned about psychological processes using these methods, they provide very sparse samples of human behaviour under quite unnatural conditions. Experience sampling methods (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1992) use smartphones, wearable sensors, social media […]

Selling Data – Should You Take Control and Sell Your Own Personal Information?

The options to sell your data are starting to appear, but do you really want to transfer ownership? Might it not be better to lease the information?

Florida is selling drivers’ personal information

People should be making choices about and benefiting from their data, not governments. Full story here. Read my post on Data Power to the People.

Data Power to the People

Today data is owned by corporations, governments, and research institutions. But it is generated by users, citizens and participants. Perhaps they should own it. A million workers working for nothing You better give ’em what they really own We got to put you down When we come into town John Lennon © Sony/ATV Music Publishing […]

Complex Human Data Summer School, Melbourne, Dec 15-20 2019

Researchers from psychology and other disciplines are increasingly relying on computational analyses of large data sets to draw conclusions about human behaviour. This kind of research requires skills that are not often taught as part of the psychology curriculum. Last year we launched a summer school to help people collect and analyse complex human data, […]