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\u201cWe hope our ongoing studies will lead to new strategies for parents, teachers, and therapists to help children with this complex disorder,\u201d said Daniel Messinger<\/strong>, PhD, director, IDSC Social and Behavioral Data Science; professor of psychology, pediatrics, electrical & computer engineering, and music engineering; coordinator, Developmental Psychology<\/strong> Program; and research director, Linda Ray Intervention Center<\/strong> at the University of Miami.<\/p>\n\u201cChildren with ASD have pervasive difficulties with social communication, said Messinger. \u201cTo understand their interactions with peers and preschool teachers, we use automated sensing devices in the classroom. IDSC\u2019s supercomputing resources are invaluable for finding patterns in the vast quantities of data generated by these sensors.\u201d<\/p>\n
A new grant from the Simons Foundation<\/strong> will support the next step in the groundbreaking ASD research being conducted by Messinger. He is the principal investigator in the collaborative two-year study, \u201cMultimodal, Objective Assessment of the ASD Phenotype: Longitudinal Stability and Change Across Contexts,\u201d along with researchers from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and University of Southern California (USC).<\/p>\n The study will enroll 150 three- to five-year-old children to investigate how objective measurements of ASD-related behaviors, such as movement, speaking, and conversational turn-taking, are associated with the disorder\u2019s severity. \u201cWe will study them throughout the school year to determine the stability of ASD-relevant behaviors and whether they change with time in both a relatively controlled clinical assessment and in relatively unconstrained preschool,\u201d Messinger said.<\/p>\n Children\u2019s behavior will be recorded with synchronized video and audio recorders. State-of-the-art machine learning approaches will be used to objectively characterize each child\u2019s vocalizations, identify social gaze and smiles, and quantify social contact and social approach (digital proxemics).<\/p>\n The Simons Foundation\u2019s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. Since its founding in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons, the foundation has been a champion of basic science through grant funding, support for research, and public engagement.<\/p>\n