Congratulations to PhD student Roland Adorjani

Congratulations to our PhD student Roland Adorjani (supervised by Dr. Thomas Grund) for winning a prestigious Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Scholarship. The enterprise partner is MindBot.inc in Dublin. The project is titled "Social Computing in the Era of e-Health".

Social Computing in the Era of e-Health

The Internet is changing the ways in which we interact in our daily lives and has come to affect even healthcare. From trendy fitness apps to social applications that foster interactions between patients and professionals – transferring what was once face-to-face patient-doctor consultations into the cloud, the past couple of years have taken this trend a step further by introducing online text-based therapy to the world of e-health. An emergent online industry, e-therapy draws large communities, turning the Internet in what has become an alternative, modern-day arena for health treatments.


This research project attempts to study the impact of these novel online e-therapy outcomes, by focusing on the analysis of social text data. Previous research carried out on traditional therapy needs to be followed up by the study of novel, technology-mediated treatment interventions. This thesis proposal introduces a framework that models and quantifies aspects of dialog data in this new e-therapy setting, using data captured from applications that foster interactions between millions of users over online platforms and study their efficacy by using a social computational approach to large-scale conversational data. The target phenomenon, coordination in conversation has been described as a process whereby interlocutors align in a spontaneous, unconscious, and yet adaptive ways. A social mechanism that drives joint outcomes in multiple domains, research on doctor-patient communication has shed light on the adaptive nature of these social behaviours, showing that optimal engagement patterns can be linked to treatment outcomes. The findings of this proposed research are expected to follow up and augment this line of research by approaching e-therapy, a contribution also aimed at shaping the future of e-health systems, including Chatbots.