I recently began supervising a PhD student in the Auckland robotic-engineering department and we are looking to partner with psychotherapists to develop a companion robot. Do you know anyone relevant/interested?

(I promise that our eventual robotic solution will not be a two-headed monstrosity featuring my face on a kiwi bird's body... but maybe it helped get your attention 😂)

Through several years of upcoming R&D at The University of Auckland (I will mostly be supervising remotely from New York!), our project aims to develop a therapeutic A.I. model (e.g., a multi-modal Large Language Model) to power the conversational, perceptual and (potentially) real-time video-generation capabilities of a companion robot that gives its user (which could be in a clinical or at-home setting) personalized therapy and support when a human therapist is unavailable.

A particularly prominent challenge for us in developing and testing this LLM (and, eventually, robotic embodiment) is access to data from real therapeutic conversations, although there are other immediate and long-term R&D challenges that we would love practicing therapists to help us with as well.

This is an exciting, impactful project that could markedly improve millions of lives around the world in the coming decades. I applaud PhD candidate Maryam Khakpour for tackling it head on! If you're a clinician who's keen to be involved with the A.I. revolution, now's your chance :)