I participated in an event organised by Prof Helen Minnis, a leading expert in child attachment issues, to show how Social AI can help to identify children experiencing attachment problems. The interesting connection between psychiatry and AI is that many tests used to detect mental health issues are designed to elicit behavioural variance associated to condition variance. In other words, the tests are designed in such a way that people with different underlying conditions behave in different observable ways. This is very suitable with AI approaches that, in very general terms, associate variance in observable data with variance in non-observable or non-available information.

The most interesting aspect of the event is that the audience included mostly child psychiatrists that were never exposed before to the type of AI we use to analyse behaviour. Many of them manifested surprise and mentioned that they could not imagine AI could be about this. This gives me hope that maybe one day we will bridge the existing gap between laboratory research and clinical practice.

The slides for the event are available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6qn95cjn82ukogd/Attachment.pdf?dl=0