SEPTEMBER 12, 2025
Guillermo Cecchi, PhD
Principal Research Staff Member – Computational Psychiatry and Neuroimaging
IBM Research
About the Presentation: Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), coupled with the pervasive use of digital technology (DT) such as smartphones and wearable sensors, are revolutionizing mental health research by enabling large-scale studies beyond traditional clinical settings. AI and DT offer unprecedented opportunities to forecast disease progression and treatment outcomes by identifying subtle predictive patterns and dramatically increasing the frequency and diversity of observations.
This presentation will showcase the application of interpretable AI methods to predict diverse outcomes from minimally structured, naturalistic data, including onset of psychosis in clinical high-risk youth, early Alzheimer’s disease in cognitively healthy adults, response to placebo intervention in chronic pain, and drug use behavior in addiction. We will further discuss how DT facilitates continuous, at-home monitoring of conditions like ALS and chronic pain, and how AI can integrate high-volume behavioral and physiological data into composite metrics that complement traditional clinical assessments. Finally, we will discuss the implementation of these approaches in ongoing large-scale initiatives.
About the Presenter: Guillermo Cecchi received an education in Physics (MSc), Physics and Biology (PhD, Rockefeller University), and Imaging in Psychiatry (Fellow, Weill Cornell Medical Center). He has been interested in diverse aspects of theoretical biology, including Brownian transport, molecular computation, spike reliability in neurons, song production and representation in songbirds, statistics of natural images and visual perception, statistics of natural language, and brain imaging. In 2001 he joined IBM Research to work on computational approaches to brain function. In recent years, Dr. Cecchi has pioneered the use of a computational linguistics approach to quantify a broad spectrum of psychiatric and neurologic conditions. Dr. Cecchi directs the Computational Psychiatry and the Neuroimaging group in the Digital Health program at IBM Research, is Associate Director of Analytics of Advancing Medicines Partnerships® on Schizophrenia (U24 AMP SCZ and CT-AMP SCZ), and co-Director of the PREDiCTOR Program (U01) for outcomes research across all mental health outpatients in New York City Mt Sinai hospitals.