ieso’s Chief AI Officer, Valentin, leads the teams who turn our unrivalled therapy dataset into the breakthrough insights that are revolutionising mental healthcare. He has spent over 20 years in the field of Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation, and Artificial Intelligence.

He holds a Doctorate from the University of Sheffield. And the expertise in text mining, information extraction and big data that he accrued at Sheffield over a 14-year period, led Amazon to hire him as lead scientist on the service that powers its smart assistant Alexa’s general knowledge answering capabilities.

His team now apply the same advanced AI techniques to ieso’s vast dataset of anonymised mental health transcripts – the largest in the world. In 2019 he oversaw the creation of the ground-breaking Therapy Insights Model supervision tool (TIM). It uses machine learning to analyse therapy sessions, helping therapists determine which evidence-based therapy interventions will work best for which patient, driving up patient outcomes.

“In recent centuries physical health treatment has benefited hugely from advances in technology. MRI, CAT, X-Ray scans have allowed medics to extract very accurate data about patients. For mental health the problem hitherto has been that a lot of the valuable data is encoded in language. So we’ve had to rely on the intuitions of individual therapists – an unscalable, artisanal approach. Now at last we have the tools to analyse language at scale so can find out what is really going on."