Schizophrenia is a mental illness characterized by delusions and hallucinations, such as hearing voices. Symptoms of schizophrenia typically begin to emerge when an individual is in their early 20s. Often, however, people go undiagnosed for years. New artificial intelligence technology may be able to predict the symptoms of schizophrenia earlier, which can help people with the condition get early treatment. Speech Recognition Harvard and Emory University researchers have developeda machine-learning approach to analyzing an individual's language for signs of psychosis.

Language is a fascinating tool, one that allows humans to share thoughts with one another. Often enough, if used with clarity and precision, language leads to an accord of minds. Language is also the tool by which psychiatrists evaluate a patient for particular psychoses or mental disorders, including schizophrenia. However, these evaluations tend to depend on the availability of highly trained professionals and adequate facilities. Enter a team comprising members of IBM Research's Computational Psychiatry and Neuroimaging groups and universities around the globe.

Although the language of thinking is deliberate--let me think, I have to do some thinking--the actual experience of having thoughts is often passive. Ideas pop up like dandelions; thoughts occur suddenly and escape without warning. People swim in and out of pools of thought in a way that can feel, paradoxically, mindless. Most of the time, people don't actively track the way one thought flows into the next. But in psychiatry, much attention is paid to such intricacies of thinking.