EAGER: Collaborative Research: Understanding Human Behaviors and Mental Health using Federated Machine Learning on Smart Phones

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Understanding human behaviors and mental health are becoming increasingly important for modern society. The ongoing outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) not only further highlights its importance but also calls for immediate action. This project will develop a federated machine-learning (FL) framework and application on mobile device for understanding human behaviors and mental health. The planned research will synergize interdisciplinary research and particularly push the envelopes of federated learning and public health. This project will not only provide an important and timely real-world application, health-behavior monitoring and prediction, for the federated learning community, but also will advance our understanding of physical and mental health through mobile devices, and the impacts of COVID-19 to human society in a unique and detailed angle. This project will integrate the interdisciplinary research results into courses, and train students from underrepresented groups. Technically, the project has two main components: 1) Data collection and statistical analysis, and 2) Building federated learning framework and application. In the first component, the project will collect smartphone-based sensor data from student sub-population in both urban and suburban areas along with other health related surveys and data. The project will specifically analyze and determine what data collected from the mobile phone can be the indictors and causal factors of behavior and mental health. In the second component, the project will develop deep learning models to predict human behaviors, physical and mental health conditions/trends over time, under rigorous privacy protection. Specifically, the prediction models will be developed in federated learning settings to train the model locally on the device with differential privacy guarantees, without collecting sensor data to the cloud. Finally, the project will develop a federated learning based behavior monitoring and prediction application on mobile phones and will evaluate the prototype system on the cohort of studies from first component.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.