Rate My Professor James Benoit

James Benoit is affiliated with the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta in Computing Science. He holds a PhD in Psychiatry from the University of Alberta, an MA in Applied Ethics, and a BSc (Honours) in Integrated Sciences from the University of British Columbia. His career includes postdoctoral appointments at the University of Alberta and Harvard Medical School, where he collaborated with partners including Pfizer, Oracle, and the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. He previously led Business Intelligence at CASA Mental Health, integrating multi-source data into dashboards and piloting AI-assisted analysis, and founded an AI consulting company.

Benoit’s research focuses on AI methods for strengthening Canadian cyber security, particularly the detection and mitigation of foreign disinformation, blending machine learning with human-in-the-loop evaluation and drawing on his background in computational psychiatry and applied data science. Key publications include “The role of machine learning in clinical research: transforming the future of evidence generation” (2021), “Systematic review of digital phenotyping and machine learning in psychosis spectrum illnesses” (2020), “ChatGPT for Clinical Vignette Generation, Revision, and Evaluation” (2023), and “Using machine learning to predict remission in patients with major depressive disorder treated with desvenlafaxine” (2022). He has contributed to work on neural correlates of high-risk behavior in adolescents and characteristics of acute childhood illness apps for parents.