CDS x ACM History Committee Lecture Series
CDS x ACM History Committee Lecture Series
The NYU Center for Disability Studies is partnering with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) History Committee on an annual lecture series about disability and the history of computing. Our spring 2026 event features Professor Jeff Nagy (York University) presenting on “Big Blue: Computing Depression from the DSM to AI Psychodiagnostics.
Big Blue: Computing Depression from the DSM to AI Psychodiagnostics with Jeff Nagy and Whit Pow (Spring 2026)
The Center for Disability Studies (CDS) and The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) History Committee are hosting an event with Jeff Nagy in conversation with Whit Pow, who will examine the remaking of psychiatric disability in an AI era through the case of algorithmic depression diagnostics. Depression diagnosis and treatment have long been targets for computation, from early patient tracking systems to cognitive behavioral therapy software. But what happens to the political economy of diagnosis in the scalar shift from clinic to platform, and in the concomitant translation from diagnostic criteria to machine learning features? What can we learn about an emergent technopolitics of depression by examining these systems and the datasets they depend on? This talk takes up these questions, leveraging a database of three decades of attempts to bring AI to bear on depression diagnosis.
Moderated by Mara Mills.
