Projects


Investment Science

WSDM '20, AAAI '20,

Investing is hard because of the incredible number of factors that influence the success or failure of ventures. Some of these factors are within a venture's control, and others are not. We are developing AI methods, tools and datasets to understand these factors and the complex interactions between them so that we can all do a better job assessing risk and identifying investment opportunities.



In-person social network

website, TEDx, press

An average person spends two hours a day on social media, but almost half of us eat lunch alone. We created Connect to solve that problem. Since its creation in 2015, we have arranged nearly 10,000 platonic, in-person connections between students, alumni and staff at MIT, and are expanding to other schools in the United States, and abroad. Contact us if you're interested in bringing Connect to your University.



Using speech to determine health and happiness

AAAI'17 ( slides , press , video), Interspeech'18 ( award, press )

What you say and how you say it can teach us a lot about you! We are developing algorithms that passively learn about physical and emotional health using speech, text, and physiological signals. We've developed methods to detect cognitive impairment, and how people feel during conversations.



Sensing the unspoken

CinC'15 ( slides ), EMBC'18 ( poster, press )

Decisions about patient care, especially in the ICU, are complicated. Doctors consider an incredible number of factors when deciding what exams to order, and what treatments to prescribe. But doctors aren't machines; In addition to signals, charts, and measurements, they also have "gut feelings" about their patients. We want to understand if these gut feelings are measurable, and to what extent they impact care decisions. To answer these questions we've studied 10 years of medical data, collecting information on all the patient factors that influence doctor's care decisions, but we also quantified how the doctors felt about their patients by performing sentiment analysis on their notes. We discovered that a doctor's feelings about a patient predicted care decisions, independent of what the hard data was telling them.



There's nothing like a good night's sleep

JECM'14, CinC'18 ( slides, data )

There's nothing as refreshing as a good night's sleep and few things compare to the discomfort of sleep deprivation. Everyone sleeps, but exactly why we sleep, and how it affects our waking lives, remains a mystery. We are collaborating with clinicians to better understand why we sleep, and releasing data so others can join us in the search for answers!


Understanding 'Fake News'

ICDM'15 BidData'16,

Fake news is a big problem, but it's not immediately obvious what makes a story false. We're learning how rumors are generated, and tracking their propagation through social network so they can be stopped!



Coma prognostication

EMBC'15, NCS'16, ACNS'17, CCM'18, Thesis (slides)

Cardiac arrest impacts over half a million people a year. Even if successfully resuscitated, patients can enter an indefinite coma. Predicting if patients will wake up from coma can prevent premature withdraw of care. We compiled the world's largest dataset of Electroencephalograms (EEG) from patients in coma after cardiac arrest, and built advanced algorithms that use EEG to rapidly predict coma outcomes.


Personalized medication dosing

ICM'14, EMBS'16, AAAI'18 EMBC'18 (slides)

Mis-dosing sensitive medications can have dire consequences for patient care. We developed a personalized medication dosing algorithm that is robust to missing data, a common problem in intensive care settings. The approach was 29% more accurate than intensive care staff, and better able to distinguish outcomes than non-personalized models.



Digitizing paper records

BigData'17 ( slides, code)

Clinical researchers, historians, educators and field researchers regularly capture data on paper spreadsheets. We built a tool that transcribes images of paper-based spreadsheets into electronic form. The open-source tool provides a generalized solution for spreadsheet transcription that maintains privacy, is up to 10 times faster and twice as cost effective as existing alternatives.


Medical 'Big Data'

Nature Scientific Data '16 ( data )

We provide a freely accessible, large, single-center database comprising information relating to patients admitted to critical care units at a large tertiary care hospital. Data includes vital signs, medications, laboratory measurements, observations and notes charted by care providers, and more. The database supports applications including academic and industrial research, quality improvement initiatives, and higher education coursework.



Biomarkers of schizophrenia

Front Hum Neurosci.'12

Genetic factors contribute to the etiology of mental diseases, including schizophrenia. We developed a method to identify genetic variations associated with functional brain networks in schizophrenia. We found functional networks located in the thalamus, anterior and posterior cingulate gyri. The contributing genetic factors fell into two clusters centered at chromosome 7q21 and chromosome 5q35.


Mapping mental representations

Curr Biol. '13

Humans develop rich mental representations that guide their behavior in a variety of everyday tasks. We developed a novel method to extract these complex representations through simple tasks. The extracted distributions allow us to predict the behavior of subjects to novel stimuli.



A game where your heart is the controller

App, press

We worked with a team from the Netherlands to develop algorithms for the first game that uses your heart as the game controller.


Copyright, Mohammad M. Ghassemi, 2019