About AI4Mental

The International Workshop on AI for Cognitive and Mental Health Support (AI4Mental) is a half-day interdisciplinary forum held in conjunction with KDD 2026.

Mission

Cognitive and mental health (CMH) disorders are increasingly prevalent worldwide and pose significant societal, clinical, and economic challenges. While conventional mental health support methods remain limited by scalability and reactivity, recent advances in artificial intelligence have opened new opportunities for scalable, proactive, and personalized mental health support.

AI4Mental aims to:

• Consolidate emerging research in AI for cognitive and mental health
• Foster cross-disciplinary dialogue among researchers and practitioners
• Advance trustworthy, effective, and socially responsible AI solutions
• Align with SIGKDD’s mission on data science for social good

Three Pillars

The workshop focuses on three complementary pillars:

1. AI as Assessment - Leveraging AI to assess cognitive states, mental health risks, and behavioral patterns
2. AI as Emotional Support - AI systems providing empathetic, supportive, and context-aware interactions
3. AI as Psychological Intervention - AI-driven interventions supporting treatment, behavior change, and recovery

Audience

The workshop is designed to attract a diverse and interdisciplinary audience, including:

• Researchers in artificial intelligence, data mining, and natural language processing
• Practitioners in psychology, psychiatry, public health, and digital healthcare
• Industry professionals working on mental health technologies
• Policy makers and regulatory experts

Format

AI4Mental will be organized as a half-day on-site workshop featuring:

• Keynote speeches from leading experts
• Panel discussions with moderated debates
• Long and short paper presentations
• Interactive community-building breakout sessions

Contact Information

Primary Contact:

• Xiangmeng Wang
• Email: xiangmengpoly.wang@polyu.edu.hk
• Affiliation: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Co-organizer:

• Haoyang Li
• Email: haoyang-comp.li@polyu.edu.hk
• Affiliation: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Location

KDD 2026 Conference Venue
(Specific location to be announced)

Important Dates

Event	Date
Paper Submission Deadline	April 30th, 2026
Notification to Authors	June 4th, 2026
Camera-ready Deadline	TBD
Workshop Day	TBD

All deadlines are end-of-day in the Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone.

Acknowledgments

This workshop is supported by the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi) at UCLA.

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Keywords: Cognitive and Mental Health, AI-assisted Mental Health Support, Large Language Models, Multimodal Learning, Conversational Agents, Psychological Intervention, Trustworthy and Responsible AI, Human-AI Collaboration