Ronan Cummins

VP of Artificial Intelligence · ieso · Cambridge, UK

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About

I work at the intersection of AI and mental health, with a focus on building agentic systems that are both technically rigorous and clinically responsible. As VP of AI at ieso, I have spent the better part of a decade leading the research and development of AI that supports evidence-based psychological care — from early-stage research through to deployment in a regulated healthcare environment.

I care about AI that is grounded in evidence, honest about its limitations, and designed with the people it affects in mind. My background spans academic research and applied industry work: I was previously a Senior Research Associate in the NLIP group at the University of Cambridge, hold a PhD in Information Retrieval from the University of Galway, and was an IRCSET Marie-Curie fellow at the University of Glasgow.

Looking ahead, I’m most interested in agentic systems that are transparent enough to be genuinely trusted, systems that can show their reasoning, be questioned, and be understood. In mental health, I think the measure of a good agentic system is not just engagement but exit: whether it helps someone develop the insight and self-understanding to go out and live a life that is actually theirs. The goal should be an agentic system that orients people towards their own values and then, having done its job, steps aside. Not an app for life.

Experience

VP of Artificial Intelligence · ieso · Cambridge, UK
Jan 2024–present
Leading AI strategy and development at an evidence-based digital mental health company. Responsible for the technical direction of AI across research, clinical applications, and responsible deployment. Previously Director of AI Research (2021–2024), Principal AI Scientist (2018–2021), and Senior AI Scientist (2017–2018) at ieso.

Senior Research Associate · University of Cambridge, NLIP Group
2014–2017
Research on automated language teaching and assessment, in collaboration with Cambridge English; taught on the undergraduate IR and MSc NLP courses. Concurrently a consultant at iLexIR on automated assessment tools including Write & Improve.

Lecturer in Information Systems · University of Greenwich · 2013–2014
Taught databases and data mining.

Postdoctoral Researcher (Marie-Curie Fellow) · University of Glasgow, Information Retrieval Group
2009–2012
Research on query performance prediction, document score distributions, and probabilistic retrieval models.

Education

PhD, Information Retrieval · University of Galway · 2004–2008
Thesis on evolving term-weighting schemes for information retrieval using genetic programming.

Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education · University of Greenwich · 2013–2014

Research Interests

  • Responsible AI in Healthcare and Clinical Settings
  • Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics
  • Machine Learning and Deep Learning
  • Information Retrieval
  • Computational Approaches to Mental Health

Selected Publications

Quantifying the Association Between Psychotherapy Content and Clinical Outcomes Using Deep Learning
Michael P Ewbank, Ronan Cummins, Valentin Tablan, Sarah Bateup, Ana Catarino, Alan J Martin, Andrew D Blackwell
JAMA Psychiatry, 77(1):35–43, 2020

Constrained Multi-Task Learning for Automated Essay Scoring
Ronan Cummins, Meng Zhang, Ted Briscoe
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2016)

A Pólya Urn Document Language Model for Improved Information Retrieval
Ronan Cummins, Jiaul H. Paik, Yuanhua Lv
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 33, 2015

Full publication list →

Affiliations