33 Dr Jasy Liew

Refining Technology

When Dr Jasy Liew noticed many of her peers showing signs of anxiety and depression, she started to realise how this serious issue hadn’t been given the spotlight it was due. “It’s bizarre to think of how huge the problem actually is, and how we have yet to see any effective use of technology to prevent depression,” she says.

As a result, her research currently focuses on humanising technology and developing more emotion-sensitive systems. She started out by experimenting with social media texts at first, and hopes to be able to test the generalisability of the models in other text sources and domains in order to make it possible for such technology to be deployed at a larger scale.

“I’m still working on improving automatic emotion detection in texts, especially at a fine-grained level,” she admits, sharing her hope to create more emotion-sensitive applications that are meant to help monitor and regulate a person’s emotions. Another new project that she has recently taken under her wing also looks into how we can leverage on computers to help detect traces of cyberbullying on social media.

Her research in emotion-sensitive technology has made her the proud recipient of the 2017 L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award alongside fellow scientists Dr Ho Weng Kee and Dr Teh Su Yean. “It was such an honour as it is one of Malaysia’s most coveted awards amongst women in the scientific community,” Jasy expresses. “It feels amazing to be recognised for the kind of science that I do.”