Over 70 million people worldwide suffer from stuttering. Without intervention, many of these individuals endure this communication disorder for their entire lives. Even so, intervention therapies may not be accessible as they can be considered out-of-pocket expenses and not always covered by insurance.. In a lifetime, the stuttering population is disproportionately at risk for heightened anxiety, insecurity, and isolation. This life-long speech disorder stigmatizes its victims as socially inept. Personally and professionally, these individuals are limited by a fluency issue which is out of their control. 

 

Books are a profound resource. Novels especially are permanently inscribed with a vast archive of information and narratives. They highlight unseen elements of the human condition that would never be revealed in objective texts. When filtered through computational analysis, these books can inform intelligent systems about the most intimate parts of the human experience, and in turn, improve their capacity for human-centered reasoning.

 

Part seven of our AI Researcher Profile series invites Associate Professor Fusheng Wang of the Department of Computer Science and of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, to speak on his profound research efforts which are currently making inroads toward the ongoing opioid epidemic.

 

AI: What types of research interest you, and what inspired you to get involved with this research?