Simon D'Alfonso

Leveraging Large Language Models for Simulated Psychotherapy Client Interactions: Development and Usability Study of Client101 Background: In recent years large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable ability to generate human-like text. One potential application of this capability is using LLMs to simulate clients in a ...

mededu.jmir.org/2025/1/e68056

How do users of a mental health app conceptualise digital therapeutic alliance? A qualitative study using the framework approach - BMC Public Health Background Self-guided mental health smartphone applications (apps) have the potential to increase access to evidence-based psychological interventions and reduce the burden on staff resources in stra...

link.springer.com/article/10.1... How do users of a mental health app conceptualise digital therapeutic alliance? A qualitative study using the framework approach

OpenAI Says It's Hired a Forensic Psychiatrist as Its Users Keep Sliding Into Mental Health Crises OpenAI said it's hiring a forensic psychiatrist to help research the effects of its AI products on users' mental health.

futurism.com/openai-foren...

Therapy shock: Pioneering mental health chatbot is shutting down A landmark AI therapy chatbot is closing down on June 30, and industry experts believe that its demise is most likely in response to the challenges of delivering impactful mental health services and n...

newatlas.com/mental-healt...

📢 Announcing the 10th Mental Health Workshop at Ubicomp/ISWC 2025 in Espoo, Finland, October 12th or 13th (TBD).

📝 We invite papers exploring the role of ubiquitous computing + mental health in clinical and/or general populations.

📅 Submission deadline June 13. More ubicomp-mental-health.github.io

Synthetic Empathy: Generating and Evaluating Artificial Psychotherapy Dialogues to Detect Empathy in Counseling Sessions Daniel Cabrera Lozoya, Eloy Hernandez Lua, Juan Alberto Barajas Perches, Mike Conway, Simon D’Alfonso. Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 20...

Synthetic Empathy: Generating and Evaluating Artificial Psychotherapy Dialogues to Detect Empathy in Counseling Sessions aclanthology.org/2025.clpsych...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New publication from a study that used AWARE - "SmartSense-D: A safety, feasibility, and acceptability pilot study of digital phenotyping in young people with major depressive disorder" (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...)

We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how AI may appear human, but it is an illusion we must tackle.

#AI isn’t human, no matter how advanced it appears. It processes patterns rather than thinking. Let's move away from the saviour narrative and recognise AI for the powerful tool it is. With human oversight, clear guidelines, and solid ethics, that's where real value emerges. #AIEthics #ResearchSky

‘She helps cheer me up’: the people forming relationships with AI chatbots From virtual ‘wives’ to mental health support, more than 100m people are using personified chatbots

While research found most interviewees gained validation from close relationships with chatbots... these were hollowed out versions of friendship: providing entertainment when bored..."There’s was no sense of growth or development or challenging yourself.”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Could your next therapist be a robot? | Particle The use of artificial intelligence in psychotherapy is on the rise – but it comes with a warning.

Could your next therapist be a robot? particle.scitech.org.au/health/could...

Clinical decision support systems in mental health: A scoping review of health professionals’ experiences Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) have the potential to assist health professionals in making informed and cost-effective clinical decisions w…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

pacja.org.au/article/1298... Balancing Ethics and Opportunities: The Role of AI in Psychotherapy and Counselling

We’re hiring! The UQ School of EECS is recruiting a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer (Asst. Prof.) in Applied AI for a continuing teaching & research role. Join us to help build a new Centre of Excellence in AI & Data Science between UQ (Brisbane, Australia) & Thapar Institute (India).

Development of a digital therapeutic alliance scale (MM-DTA) in the context of fully automated mental health apps Therapeutic alliance (TA) refers to the relationship between a therapist and a client in face-to-face therapy and is an essential ingredient in successful psychological therapy outcomes. With the a...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Development of a digital therapeutic alliance scale (MM-DTA) in the context of fully automated mental health apps

Workshop A: FROM PIXELS TO PSYCHOLOGY: DECODING BEHAVIOUR THROUGH SMARTPHONE SENSING ubicomp.oulu.fi/ubiss2025/wo...

Nomophobia, Psychopathology, and Smartphone-Inferred Behaviors in Youth With Depression: Longitudinal Study Background: Smartphones have become an indispensable part of people’s lives, and the fear of being without them, what has been termed “no mobile phone phobia” (nomophobia), is a growing phenomenon. Th...

Nomophobia, Psychopathology, and Smartphone-Inferred Behaviors in Youth With Depression: Longitudinal Study formative.jmir.org/2025/1/e57512

Home WELCOME TO UbiComp / ISWC 2025

www.ubicomp.org/ubicomp-iswc...

If you know your Plato (and I hope you do), "efficiency" has been cover for authoritarianism since ancient times. It's all there in the "Republic."

Designing Technologies for Value-based Mental Healthcare: Centering Clinicians' Perspectives on Outcomes Data Specification, Collection, and Use Health information technologies are transforming how mental healthcare is paid for through value-based care programs, which tie payment to data quantifying care outcomes. But, it is unclear what outco...

Really excited to share a preprint of our upcoming CHI 2025 paper on designing technologies for value-based mental healthcare. I've been interested in how HCI can improve health services more broadly, and this paper takes a first step towards that.

www.arxiv.org/abs/2502.01829

OpenAI says DeepSeek ‘inappropriately’ copied ChatGPT – but it’s facing copyright claims too The upside to this war of words? More competition is boosting consumer choice, including with OpenAI’s release over the weekend of a new AI model, o3-mini.

OpenAI blasts DeepSeek for “inappropriately” copying ChatGPT—but is it a case of innovation or infringement? My colleague Lea Frermann and I provide a lay-summary on DeepSeek’s new R1 model, its resourceful approach, and the AI-battles unfolding. Read more: theconversation.com/openai-says-...

Understanding User Behavior in the Wild Using Smartphones The ubiquity of smartphones offers a unique lens for studying human behavior in natural settings. Smartphone sensing, an expanding field driven by the widespread use of sensor-rich smartphones, facili...

Understanding User Behavior in the Wild Using Smartphones link.springer.com/referencewor...

Australia’s university vice-chancellors are among the highest-paid in the world. But do their generous salaries translate into good student outcomes? 🤔

The data shows, nope.

China just redefined the global AI race—with massive implications for OpenAI, Nvidia, and foreign policy Silicon Valley’s initial advantage in LLMs evaporated quickly despite export controls, writes AI expert Gary Marcus.

"I have said it before, and I will say it again—OpenAI may well become the WeWork of AI," @garymarcus.bsky.social writes in a new commentary piece for Fortune. fortune.com/2025/01/27/a...

Donate to Wikipedia.

Do it today, and every time one of the broligarchs has a tantrum because he can’t buy it

Artificial intelligence is impacting the field Psychologists are working to channel the power of AI and limit its harm.

www.apa.org/monitor/2025...

AWARE-Light: a smartphone tool for experience sampling and digital phenotyping - Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Due to their widespread adoption, frequent use, and diverse sensor capabilities, smartphones have become a powerful tool for academic studies focused on sampling human behaviour. While packing many te...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A Tool for Capturing Smartphone Screen Text | Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

American Psychological Association sounds alarm over certain AI chatbots The APA asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.

mashable.com/article/ai-t...

aij.ijcai.org/funding-oppo...

The great promise of tech was that it would free us from drudgery, it’s now coming for knowledge and creative jobs. The luddites hold a lesson for us all.