Sofia De La Fuente Garcia

Research Fellow (Pilot Studies and Evaluation)

Biography

Background

I am a Research Fellow on the project "INT-ACT: Intangible Cultural Heritage: Bridging the Past, Present and Future", funded by EU Horizon, in the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Informatics. The project studies the interface between intangible cultural heritage, wellbeing and artificial intelligence. 

My university qualifications are: Psychology (BSc Hons), Methodology for Health and Behavioural Sciences (MSc) and AI and speech as a digital marker for cognitive health (PhD).

The core of my doctoral research consisted of the development of a methodology for speech collection based on Scottish heritage and folklore, and aimed at assesing speech as a digital marker for monitoring cognitive health. For this, I worked closely with my supervisors, Prof Saturnino Luz and Prof Craig Ritchie, and I have continued working in Prof Luz's lab since then, extending this methodology and being involved in other projects on speech technology and wellbeing, such as INT-ACT, currently.

My interests span perspectives on cognitive health and mental wellbeing, and within the INT-ACT project, the interplay between them and intangible cultural heritage through personal narratives. I would also like to investigate the impact of mindfulness and states of flow on mental/emotional health, in the context of building and crafting, particularly working with ancient crafts.

 

 

CV

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Qualifications

PhD Precision Medicine (AI and speech as a digital marker for cognitive health)

MSc Methodology for Behavioural and Health Sciences

BSc (Hons) Psychology

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Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

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Diploma on Systems and Family Therapy

Gestalt Psychotherapy Foundational course 

 

Responsibilities & affiliations

Graduate member of the British Psychological Society (with basis for chartered membership)

Postgraduate teaching

 

 

 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Research summary

Cultural heritage and wellbeing, evolution and cognition, AI and speech markers for monitoring cognitive health.

Project activity

  • INT-ACT: Intangible Cultural Heritage, Bridging the Past, Present and Future. Research on the interplay bewteen intangible cultural heritage, wellbeing and artificial intelligence.   
  • PsyVoiD: personal narratives of the COVID-19 lockdown in Scotland. Research on the associations between wellbeing, coping strategies, anxiety, depression and narrative stories of the lockdown.  
  • Prevent-ED: published methodology for multimodal data collection based on Scottish heritage and folklore, and specifically aimed at assessment of speech as a biomarker for cognitive health. This is a dialogue sub-study in the Prevent Dementia cohort, based in Edinburgh, in collaboration with the Centre for Dementia Prevention.  
  • ADReSS Challenge 2020 and ADReSSo Challenge 2021 (http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/sluzfil/ADReSSo-2021/), organised through the annual Interspeech conference.

Current project grants

- Research Fellowship funded by Horizon Europe: INT-ACT, under grant agreement ID: 101132719 (DOI: 10.3030/101132719).
- "Evaluating the impact of intangible cultural heritage experiences on the wellbeing of older adults with cognitive impairment: a pilot study in Scotland", awareded by Brain Health ARC 2025 Pump Priming Awards under "The Brain Health Alliance for Research Challenges".

Past project grants

Transitional Fellowship, 13 months: MRC, grant number MR/N013166/1. The project is also supported by our industrial partner in Japan: PST Inc.
Doctoral training: MRC Precision medicine, 4 years 2016-2020.
Traineeship at Karolinska Institutet, summer 2016: erasmus traineeship and local funding.
Collaborative award by the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 2015-2016: financial support for researching at Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience.
Collaborative Award by the Spanish Government, 2014-2015: financial support for researching at Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience.

Participant

Alzheimer's Association Neuroscience Next Online event, November 2020: Factor analysis of prosodic features for predicting risk-factors for dementia in a healthy population.

Prevent General Assembly Online event, September 2020: Investigating the potential of speech features for monitoring cognitive health in dementia.

Scottish Research Dementia Consortium, Glasgow, UK, April 2019: Prevent-ED: investigating dialogue features to prevent dementia.

International Neuropsychological Society Meeting Prague, Czech Republic, July 2018: Natural Language Processing for Cognitive Status Prediction.

10th Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 2018: Evaluating cognition through linguistic features.

2nd Human Brain Project Student Conference Ljubljana, Slovenia, February 2018: Detecting Cognitive Decline through Dialogue Processing.

EU - Latin America Countries Early Career Researchers Integration, Heriot-Watt University, October 2017: Human-Robot interaction: linguistic features as early signs for dementia detection.

  • Lincoln, J., Tip, L., & de la Fuente Garcia, S. (2024). Attachment-related anxiety and social anxiety: the mediating role of self-esteem. medRxiv, 2024-05. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.05.28.24308030
  • Deng, Q., Luz, S., & de la Fuente Garcia, S. (2024). A Frame-based Attention Interpretation Method for Relevant Acoustic Feature Extraction in Long Speech Depression Detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.03138.
  • Luz, S., Haider, F., de la Fuente Garcia, S., Fromm, D., & MacWhinney, B. (2021). Editorial: Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech. Frontiers in Computer Science. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2021.780169
  • de la Fuente Garcia, S., Haider, F. & Luz, S. (2021). COVID-19: Affect recognition through voice analysis during the winter lockdown in Scotland. In 2021 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC) (pp. 2326-2329). IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630833
  • Luz, S., Haider, F., de la Fuente Garcia, S., Fromm, D., & MacWhinney, B. (2021). Speech Analysis for Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition. Frontiers in Computer Science, 96.
  • Ambegaonkar, A., Ritchie, C., & de la Fuente Garcia, S. (2021). The Use of Mobile Applications as Communication Aids for People with Dementia: Opportunities and Limitations. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports, (Preprint), 1-12. DOI: 10.3233/ADR-200259
  • de la Fuente Garcia, S., Ritchie, C., & Luz, S. (2020, November). Factor analysis of acoustic-prosodic features as an approach to predicting risk-factors for dementia in a healthy population. In Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) Neuroscience Next.  
  • de la Fuente Garcia, S., Ritchie, C. & Luz, S. (2020). Artificial Intelligence, speech and language processing approaches to monitoring Alzheimer's Disease: a systematic review. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.  DOI: 10.3233/JAD-200888  
  • Luz, S., Haider, F., de la Fuente Garcia, S., Fromm, D., & MacWhinney, B. (2020) Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition Through Spontaneous Speech: The ADReSS Challenge. In Proc. Interspeech 2020, 2172-2176, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2571.    
  • de la Fuente Garcia, S., Haider, F., & Luz, S. (2020). Cross-corpus Feature Learning between Spontaneous Monologue and Dialogue for Automatic Classication of Alzheimer's Dementia Speech. In 42nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC 202) (pp. 5851-5855). 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9176305    
  • Haider, F., de la Fuente Garcia, S., Albert, P., & Luz, S. (2020). Afective speech for Alzheimer's dementia recognition. In LREC 2020: Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 11-16 May 2020 (p. 67).    
  • de Frutos-Lucas, J., Lopez-Sanz, D., Cuesta, P., Bruña, R., de la Fuente Garcia, S., Serrano, N., Lopez, M. E., Delgado-Losada, M. L., Lopez-Higes, R., Marcos, A. & Maestu, F. (2020). Enhancement of posterior brain functional networks in bilingual older adults. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23 (2), 387-400.  DOI: 10.1017/S1366728919000178   
  • Haider, F., de La Fuente Garcia, S., & Luz, S. (2019). An Assessment of Paralinguistic Acoustic Features for Detection of Alzheimer's Dementia in Spontaneous Speech. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 14 (2), 272-281. DOI: 10.1109/JSTSP.2019.2955022  
  • de la Fuente Garcia, S., Ritchie, C. W., & Luz, S. (2019). Protocol for a conversation-based analysis study: PREVENT-ED investigates dialogue features that may help predict dementia onset in later life. BMJ open, 9 (3), e026254.  DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026254  
  • Luz, S., de la Fuente Garcia, S., & Albert, P. (2018). A method for analysis of patient speech in dialogue for dementia detection. In LREC: Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments (RaPID) (pp. 35-42) ELRA.
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