Let’s Talk About Mental Health — Global Shapers León invited panelist

Global Shapers León, the León, Mexico hub of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community, invited Dr. Omar Costilla Reyes to a panel titled “Hablemos de salud mental” (“Let’s talk about mental health”). It was scheduled as a Facebook Live on March 24, 2021, within the hub’s Davos Lab series, whose poster describes it as dialogues for rebuilding the city after COVID-19. The Global Shapers Community is a network of city-based hubs of young leaders, each of which runs local projects. Dr. Costilla Reyes called the invitation an honor and said he would share his experience developing projects at the intersection of mental health and artificial intelligence.

That experience came from his postdoctoral work at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) on digital phenotyping and responsible AI for mental-health research, including an MIT program he was running that January with undergraduates working on mental health in minority populations. Digital phenotyping uses the data that everyday devices such as smartphones already record, for example movement, sleep patterns and phone use, to describe how a person’s behavior changes over time. Machine-learning models can look for patterns in those data that researchers study alongside clinical assessments. Responsible AI for mental health builds privacy protection and fairness across different groups of people into the design of these methods, so that digital tools can serve diverse communities and support, rather than replace, the clinicians and families who care for them.

The poster named Jerry García as moderator and, as fellow panelists, Andrea Campos, chief executive and founder of the mental-health app YANA, and Luis Royero Meneses, founder and director of Salutis Tech Ventures. Dr. Costilla Reyes described them as two great entrepreneurs with whom he looked forward to sharing the panel. The poster lists him as a researcher at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT.