LUCID Announces Partnership with Mila to Advance Machine Learning in Therapeutic Music

TORONTO, ONT., June 28, 2022 — LUCID Inc., a digital music therapy startup, has formed a strategic partnership with Montreal-based Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute, to advance the research and development of machine learning in the therapeutic music space.

“ML systems hold the key to transform music into precision medicine; through their ability to find the right music at the right time, providing predictable benefits for anyone who uses the system,” said Aaron Labbé, Co-Founder and CTO at LUCID. “With the amazing team at Mila, we’re excited to work on deep learning and reinforcement learning solutions to change the landscape of mental and neuropsychiatric health, and turn music into medicine.”

This partnership will allow Mila to collaborate on ML research conducted at LUCID. Earlier this year, LUCID’s technology was clinically validated to relieve symptoms of anxiety, and is currently being developed into a digital therapeutic for Alzheimer’s.

In the near term, this research will focus on three of LUCID’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems: 

• ‘AMRS’  is a cutting edge reinforcement learning system which predicts the optimal music to help a specific listener achieve a desired mental state. 
• ‘BioMIR’ is a deep learning system that predicts the psychological response to music for specific patient populations, such as those with anxiety. 
• ‘Absorption’ is a reinforcement learning system that leverages a listener’s novel biometric response to curate music that maximizes digital bioavailability (i.e. listener engagement).

“There are huge advancements happening in digital health, and we’re excited to unite ML and music with LUCID,” says Stéphane Létourneau, Executive Vice President at Mila. “Mila strives to push the boundaries of ML research, strengthen the AI ecosystem, and accelerate social innovation. We believe that this partnership with LUCID will help achieve our organizations’ goals.”

With the support of Mila, LUCID hopes to attract local and international talent in the AI ecosystem. As Montreal is establishing itself as an international hub for artificial intelligence, both organizations are proud to be working within this innovation cluster.

About LUCID

LUCID develops therapeutic music experiences for mental health. By unlocking the power of neuroscience and machine learning, LUCID’s AI curates music experiences that are optimized for specific emotional outcomes. They provide personalized, evidence-based, and accessible solutions for mental health. LUCID is working towards the clinical validation of music as medicine. Learn more at www.thelucidproject.ca.

About Mila

Founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Mila is an artificial intelligence research institute that brings together nearly 900 researchers specializing in machine learning. Based in Montreal, Mila’s mission is to be a global hub for scientific advances that inspire innovation and development of AI for the benefit of all. Mila is a non-profit organization recognized worldwide for its significant contributions to the field of deep learning, particularly in language modeling, machine translation, object recognition, and generative models. For more information, visit mila.quebec.