Summer Fun at the PALS Lab

What an incredible summer! We had 12 summer interns working on independent or group research projects. First, check out our new lab space right on the medical campus and our updated logo (thank you, Shevya Panda)! This was our central coordination spot for the MINDS Primer event on June 30, which brought together 65 clinicians, researchers, and students for a day dedicated to AI and psychiatry research and hands-on demos. Many thanks to our speakers, Peter Zandi and Roy Adams, and to the entire PALS team for their presentations, demonstrations, and abstracts.

We had a lot of fun, especially when we had teams of clinicians and computer science faculty play tic-tac-toe against one another—but they had to answer a question before placing a marker for their team. Definitely an interesting panel!

We also had a lot of good news! In August, we presented several papers at KDD, and Rhea Makkuni received the Best Presentation Award at the KDD Undergraduate Consortium. We also received two awards from Google—a Gemini Academic Research Award for the lab and a Google Cloud Research Award supporting Rhea Makkuni and Ram Chitti’s research. And we published two journal articles: one in AI Magazine and the other in International Review of Psychiatry.

Check out our end-of-summer student presentations – from works in progress to full papers!

We’re excited to see where everyone’s research journeys take them this year!