معرفی
Dr. Patrick McAllister is a Lecturer in Computer Science at Ulster University's School of Computing, Belfast campus, with research spanning digital mental health, machine learning, and anomaly detection. His work bridges computer science and healthcare through interdisciplinary collaborations.
Education:
- PhD in Computer Science (Ulster University, 2018) - Thesis: Deep learning-based food image classification and crowdsourcing-based calorie estimation approach to support dietary management
Research Interests: Dr. McAllister pioneers AI applications for mental wellbeing, focusing on chatbot systems for bibliotherapy, multimodal sensor analytics for anomaly detection, and digital interventions for community mental health. His work integrates machine learning with clinical requirements to develop scalable health technologies, particularly targeting youth mental health and diagnostic support systems.
Publication Trends: Recent work (2023-2025) shows increasing focus on real-world AI deployment in healthcare, with 12 conference contributions and 4 journal articles exploring emotion recognition from physiological signals, explainable anomaly detection, and policy implementation of digital mental health services. His ecological study on vulture decision-making demonstrates cross-disciplinary methodology transfer.
Awards:
- Outstanding Interdisciplinary Research Team Award (2024) for digital mental health innovations
Advising and Grants: Supervises PhD researchers Muhammad Imad (Anomaly Detection) and Jing Hua Ye (Machine Learning for Emotion Recognition). Leads $1.2M NIH-funded project AI-assisted echocardiography for congenital heart defects diagnosis in Sub-Saharan Africa (2023-2026) and Department for Economy project Transforming Neonatal Cardiac Diagnostics with AI (2024-2025).
Labs and Teams: Core member of Ulster's Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing (DMHW) research group, co-organizing the International DMHW Conference (2024, 2025) and leading the MVSE Multimodal Video Search project with Health and Social Care R&D Division.
