Machines can now detect depression in people’s speech patterns and word usage without context of the situation.

Currently, medical professionals issue a standard questionnaire to identify depression, and monitor a patient’s results. Artificial Intelligence, however, can detect depression without specific questions being asked in transcripts and audio.

Research conducted by Tuka Alhanai and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a baseline developed by earlier experiments to prove that their computers could predict when someone suffered from depression with Artificial Intelligence as effectively as medical professionals. On average, it took the computer seven questions to diagnose them with text, and 30 questions with speech. Greater implications include diagnosing depression in people who live far from a doctor, or cannot attend for financial reasons.

The full Journal is Published in Interspeech.

I got pretty good this summer at writing my name loopy upside down onto the tables as I introduced myself as my customer’s server at the seafood restaurant I worked at down the Jersey Shore. Since we were little, I and many others from my native state migrated down the Garden State Parkway Friday afternoons like geese heading south for the winter to spend our weekend sun kissed by the Atlantic Ocean. As a kid, I thrived by the shore, spending my weekends boating around the Tom’s River, swimming and crabbing. My nights were spent skipping down the board walk, eating fried anything and begging my parents to let me play skee-ball or finally go on the rollercoaster.

In 2012, I remember the meteorologists saying that Sandy was “just a Superstorm”. New Jersey had seen worse. My dad took me down the shore to tie up our boat. For a boat that weighed over 1,600 pounds under normal buoyancy, a storm surge predicted at three feet, and winds predicted to be around 74 miles per hour, our weapon of choice was nylon boat line. One line could hold 1562 pounds of pressure, so the four we chose equated to the force created from the weight of the Royal Caribbean’s Anchor. It should have been safe. We placed sandbags, that created path of resistance in front of local’s homes, forcing the water to diffuse around. The floor to ceiling glass of our neighborhood’s windows contained atoms packed tightly like the pit at a concert. If existing thermal stress is paired with a physical stress, the atoms would shift, ruining the order, and the glass would explode. We hastily boarded up the windows with sheets of plywood bearing a heartier structure.

I remember sitting in my basement with my family watching the news, trembling as the 80 MPH winds and torrential downpour shuttered my house. The winds heightened in velocity and threatened to create a pressure suction that ripped my roof right off of my house. Eventually, the rain’s ferocity shielded the satellite from its signals and we entered a restless sleep.

We woke to the news showing towns that looked more like ponds with roofs as lily pads. The intense red to purple of the radar induced fear as I began to realize the true size of the storm. The six-foot storm surge pitted our tie up against the buoyancy of the water threating to crush our boat in the middle. The suction of the ocean from the Barnegat Bay created a wave of water that collapsed the houses perched upon stilts like newborn fawns learning to walk. Many houses were sucked into the ocean as two new inlets emerged in Mantoloking, a town in which every one of the 521 homes were damaged. Areal images of the coastline showed fragments of the boardwalk dusted around the sand resembling a leopard’s fur. Even worse, I woke up that I saw my beloved rollercoaster had sunk uneven into the marshy sand.

So, what caused the unexpected? Research suggests that climate change played some role in increasing the ferocity and size of the hurricanes. The extra water vapor in the atmosphere, has increased the amount of precipitation by 30 percent, and the temperatures of the lower portions of the ocean’s water have been steadily rising. On average, hurricanes obtain Category 3 status 9 hours faster now than in the 1980s. Moat of the ferocity, however, they fault to chance. The combination of the high tides due to the moon cycle and a second storm that merged with Sandy pushing it perpendicular from its course, straight to New Jersey, created the monster that destroyed the tri state area for some time.

I could not imagine my life without summers by the Jersey Shore. The experiences I had there gave me a constant to look forward to every summer, which is a main reason why I wanted to work down there and replicate my experience for someone else. So when the bus boy whispered in my ear that we were 86 Clams Casino, I looked at the clock. We couldn’t be out. At 8:30 on a Friday night our wait was still an hour and a half. Panic struck as I thought of the people who came annually for the Clams Casino, and how this joint has shaped their experience for over 30 years. How I didn’t want their experience to change the same way mine did. The entire experience made me fear that if we didn’t take care of our community, someday we may be 86 Jersey Shore.

Hi Guys!

For my final project, I chose to do a coloring book. I hope you enjoy it!

Best,

Rachel Mintz

CSET – Emerging Technology

Snickers’s catchphrase, “you’re not you when you’re hungry” is now backed up by scientific evidence.

Researchers at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, induced rats with hyperglycemia and found that this caused symptoms of stress. The study, published in Psychopharmacology in October 2018, suggests that unfed animals are more likely to go through periods of stress and discomfort compared to those who are fed.

“We became interested in this topic because of the increasing interest in food addiction,” said Thomas Horman, a psychologist at the University of Guelph. “We thought it might lead to perpetuated addictive behaviors for sure.”

The researchers chose to induce hyperglycemia because it is a symptom of food deprivation. They followed a simple design where rats experienced normal conditions in one chamber and hyperglycemia in the other before giving the rats the choice to roam freely between the two chambers. Their time spent in the food deprived chamber was recorded, and many control factors, such as sluggish behavior and the presence of certain hormones, was controlled for.

The researchers concluded that the rat’s avoidance of the chamber that they experienced hypoglycemia in demonstrates that they most likely experienced fear, stress, or another uncomfortable symptom in the chamber, and that is why they spent less time there.

Previous research has shown that the hypothalamus, a part of the brain responsible for food and thirst cravings in humans, shuts off when blood glucose levels are low. This creates an imbalance in hormones that shuts off the serotonin receptors, which allow people to feel positive emotions, throughout the brain. The result is an increase in agitation, anger, and other similar symptoms.

Further implications of this study suggest that these ideas may translate to humans, and as a result, eating consistently and not allowing one’s body to enter a state of hyperglycemia may help with mood swings, and bouts of anger or sadness.
“Reading animal literature like rat studies is super important as it answers something that we would never be able to test in humans,” explains Jennifer MacCormack, a psychologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The ultimate hope is that it will give us some clues that then we can develop some targeted studies in humans that then can test this.” It also explains the perpetual nature of diseases such as bulimia and anorexia, in which people’s lack of an adequate diet induces a sad, stressful, or anxious environment that causes them to not be hungry and continues the cycle.

In the future, the scientists plan to test whether hyperglycemia can have a long-term effect similar to depression.

“Now that we have established this is a stressor… looking at the effect this has as an incentive value and stimuli is one of the next steps we are going to explore and expanding on what we already know” said Thomas Horan. Results on this experiment may allow people to have alternative methods to help treat the symptoms of depression.

Hi guys,

This is a podcast I put together for this class. I hope you enjoy it!

Hi guys! I’ve uploaded my video at the following link! Please let me know if you enjoy it!

Thomas Clements, an undergraduate professor, is beginning his research career at Vanderbilt University. He speaks of how he plans to transition his Graduate Research about CRISPR to Vanderbilt, and some of the greater implications of his work.

PhD Thomas Clements researches CRISPR at Vanderbilt University

How did you get into biology?

It’s the classic. In like middle school, science was always my favorite class… my favorite color was green so that was my science notebook. I was always into science and math, and in highschool I started to get more into science as I started to realize math was getting harder for me, whereas science was getting more fun… After that I had to decide [a major]. I had always liked biology and chemistry (and I did not know biochemistry existed when I was a senior in highschool) so I decided to major in whichever one I got a higher grade in on the AP test. I got a higher grade in biology so I was like okay I will be a biology major.

How do you hope to bring your graduate research on CRISPR, a DNA editing tool, to Vanderbilt?

I’m going to start it … in the spring with 5 or 6 students…. I want to make what is known as a CRISPR factory. We’d partner with either faculty here or elsewhere and … get a bunch of students… to knockout [a] gene and [they’re] going to know everything about this gene which is very similar to my graduate process except we had very specific genes. … Also I want to then make … new variates on CRISPR. In my thesis project we made a new CRISPR that made larger deletions than normal crisp,r but here i want to really use the classroom to make even new varieties of CRISPR and … test them out to see if they work better.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced and will it translate here?

Because my lab was not well funded [in Grad School], we had to do a lot of [experiments] the cheap way. … We couldn’t afford to do 50 sequencing reactions per experiment so I had to look at other results. I [didn’t] get a precise [answer] but I could tell whether or not there [were] mutations that [were] there and then selectively sequence and that took me a lot more time. Here, … we can farm it out to a higher number of students to work on it so we … can selectively sequence the best ones, [or] even partner with other labs who might have the funding.

What are the greater implications of your work?

It’s like doing the exact same thing you could do with selective breeding just faster. We don’t have to then mix the two highest yield producing plants together anymore to get the high yield producing babies we can figure out what gene does that and just manipulate it our self. …There could be some ethical concerns about designer babies and all of that stuff but I think if we can use this to cure childhood diseases let’s push this as far as we can go.

Outside of CRISPR, what else are you looking to bring to campus?

My big social media thing is that I’m “science baller” and want to connect basketball which is my passion and hobby and try to connect science to that and be the scientist that also knows how to play basketball. It’s not like scientists are these nerdy people who just can’t talk to anyone. … After … I’m going to join an improv class so then i’m going to learn some techniques and hopefully that would help me in the classroom as well, or maybe we can begin like a science improv group which I think would be fun.