Computer Science Graduate Student Christopher Singh, along with Professor Nikhil Yadav's Research Paper was Accepted to HICSS

Computer Science graduate student Christopher Singh, along with Professor Nikhil Yadav's research paper was accepted to the HICSS (The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences) 2022). This is a premier conference in Information Systems, the Sciences, and IT management. The project was a 6-7 month internal research effort where they looked at building a machine learning infrastructure to study mental health in NY during COVID-19’s first wave. 

Below is an abstract of the paper:

Anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic have heightened as evidenced by the rapidly growing  corpus of research articles suggesting a link between the pandemic and mental health. This paper proposes  a  unique  end-to-end,  user-centric machine learning (ML) architecture, capable of assessing the quality of ML predictions about the occurrence of anxiety and/or  depression symptoms. A case study was presented using official New York State COVID-19 data, highlighting the plug-and-play capabilities in this architecture for both external features, and newer ML models. This is demonstrated  through  the  formal design of a custom weighted clustering algorithm which outperforms  conventional  unsupervised  techniques in grouping  symptomatic cases. The  ability to augment external sentiment data  mined from social media platforms like Twitter, increases the predictive power of this architecture. This work serves as a blueprint to build a practical ML solution to better gauge the effect of future pandemic waves on mental health.

The conference is scheduled to be held from Jan 4 -7, 2022 in Maui, Hawaii.