Iris Sommer

Professor Iris Sommer is an expert on schizophrenia, who aims to find objective measures – or biomarkers – that help diagnose whether a patient is in a psychosis. While brain scans and blood tests have shown disappointing results, the recent research from her team is showing that patients’ language use can reliably reveal whether someone is having a psychosis. Sommer and her colleagues are therefore developing artificial intelligence that can analyse both what patients are saying and how they are saying it in order to diagnose and monitor a psychotic disorder.

The DNLF Fellowship allows Iris Sommer to take the linguistic software models to a next level, by working together intensively with experts from other disciplines, especially linguists and computer scientists. Aim is to see whether automated speech analysis also works in other languages, and to build AI software that is accurate but also ethically sound.