The Digital Traces (DigiTraces) Lab at Aalto University, Department of Computer Science, is led by Dr. Talayeh Aledavood.

As our interactions with technology become increasingly ubiquitous, we leave behind vast digital traces across various devices and online platforms. Computational scientists can extract behavioral patterns from these traces to understand individual and group behaviors and how these behaviors evolve. These advances have led to the emergence of computational social science, a field that harnesses these data to study social behavior in various contexts. More recently, digital phenotyping has emerged as a means to study health states by continuously collecting and analyzing digital traces from patients. In particular, our focus is on studying the behavioral patterns of patients with mental disorders.

In DigiTraces Lab, our mission is to develop new methodologies and tools to quantify people’s behavior and turn these traces into insights about their mental and physical health and well-being. To this end, we run privacy-aware studies to collect digital traces from individuals and populations. These data may come from personal devices such as smartphones and fitness trackers or online traces such as web browser activity or social media. We develop new computational methods, stemming from different domains, from statistical and machine learning to natural language processing and large language models, depending on the needs of each project and the application domain.

Our work is highly interdisciplinary, and we work closely with clinicians, especially mental health researchers, and computer and computational scientists with different specialties. Our current and past collaborators include (in alphabetical order) Prof. Ian Barnett (University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia), Prof. Munmun de Choudhury (Georgia Tech), Prof. Juhi Kulshretha (Aalto University), Prof Erkki Isometsä (HUS hospital, University of Helsinki), Prof. Gloria Mark (UC Irvine), Prof. Koustuv Saha (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Prof. John Torous (Harvard Medical School).

Through working with our collaborators and stakeholders, we strive to bring the insights gained from our work closer to society, make a societal impact, and influence policy-making in the future.