Ellipsis Health Appoints Clinical Experts and Deep Learning Leaders to Serve on Advisory Board, Board of Directors and as a Strategic Investor

Sunil Bharitkar, Victor Carrion, Rajesh Aggarwal and Tariq Shaukat Help Guide Innovative Initiatives for Behavioral Health Startup with New Strategic Investment from Richard Socher

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Ellipsis Health

Nov 09, 2020, 10:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Ellipsis Health, pioneer of the first commercial-grade voice-based vital signs to quantify and manage depression and anxiety symptoms at scale, today announced that it has added five clinical experts and deep learning leaders to the company's Advisory Board, Board of Directors and a strategic investor. Sunil Bharitkar, PhD, Principal Scientist, artificial intelligence (AI) Research, at Samsung, Victor Carrion, MD, the John A. Turner, MD Professor at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Early Life Stress and Resilience Program, and Rajesh Aggarwal MD, PhD, Executive Vice President, Jefferson Strategic Ventures and Professor, Department of Surgery at Thomas Jefferson University, will serve on the company's Advisory Board. These industry leaders will provide deep learning and clinical insights to advance Ellipsis Health's breakthrough AI-powered technology solution for behavioral health symptom identification and management.

In addition, Ellipsis Health has welcomed Tariq Shaukat, Group President, Bumble, to the Board of Directors, and Richard Socher, PhD, Chief Scientist, EVP at Salesforce, as a strategic investor for the company. Created to serve as the foundation of 21st-century precision medicine for behavioral health, Ellipsis Health's pioneering technology provides scalable, longitudinal vital signs for depression and anxiety. The company's AI algorithms are transforming the paradigm on how mental illness is identified, treated and understood. In support of Ellipsis Health's ongoing innovation, guidance from the Bharitkar, Carrion, Aggarwal, Shaukat, and Socher provide essential expertise to bolster Ellipsis Health's continued efforts to advance the organization's scalable deep learning models.

"The Ellipsis Health executive team looks forward to leveraging the expertise of Sunil Bharitkar, Dr. Victor Carrion, Dr. Rajesh Aggarwal, Tariq Shaukat and Richard Socher to further advance our solution," said Mainul I Mondal, Founder and CEO of Ellipsis Health. "As we seek to help healthcare providers address mental health symptoms in a scalable way, it is critical to have the input and knowledge base of industry leaders to ensure our clinical decision support tool, Rising Higher, remains on the cutting-edge of behavioral health screening."

"The technologies being developed at Ellipsis Health, which are at the intersection of signal analysis, speech and AI for deeper understanding of cognitive state (e.g., mental health), are revolutionary in their nature," said Sunil Bharitkar, PhD. "Using speech and other biomarkers for assessment and guidance towards resolution of anxiety and depression is unique and provides a strong value-proposition (both clinically and being commercially viable). Scaling Ellipsis' solutions, globally, is truly an endeavor worth pursuing."

At Samsung, Bharitkar's research spans neural networks, multimedia signal processing, speech/audio, bioinformatics, physio-signal analysis and AI. Prior to Samsung, he worked at HP Labs with a focus on audio/speech and deep learning, served as Director of Audio at Dolby, where he led research in audio, signal processing, haptics and machine learning, and co-founded Audyssey Labs, a spin-off from USC, which was funded by Intel and Best Buy.

"Each of us is like a neuron, vital, but non-functional unless we connect with others," explained Victor Carrion, MD. "I am looking forward to connecting with the Ellipsis Health family to help further targeted, technology-enabled behavioral health symptom identification."

Dr. Carrion's research has concentrated in understanding how early life stress, such as traumatic experiences, alter behavior and emotion and the role of brain structure and function in these findings, and he has also developed new treatment modalities that are focused and targeted. He chaired the Mental Health Oversight and Accountability Commission for the State of California, and he published the main text on the neuroscience of posttraumatic stress in youth, as well as texts on treatment.

"Innovative companies like Ellipsis Health are vital to advancing the identification and management of behavioral health symptoms," added Rajesh Aggarwal MD, PhD. "I am honored to advise the Ellipsis team as they continue to expand the reach and depth of their breakthrough solution for evaluating high-risk patient populations through vocal analysis."

Dr. Aggarwal utilizes Jefferson Health's 14-hospital health system as a living laboratory to engage and partner with external companies to transform healthcare in its broadest sense, and he is also a front-line surgeon in an active clinical practice. Prior to Thomas Jefferson University, he maintained an academic and clinical practice as a faculty member at Imperial College London, University of Pennsylvania and McGill University.

"The world today is complex, challenging, and, let's face it, scary in many ways. Everyone's mental health and wellness is under siege, and there is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation in the world," explained Tariq Shaukat. "Ellipsis Health is providing critical, state-of-the-art capabilities to help individuals and providers to better care for their mental health."

Prior to joining Bumble as Group President, Shaukat was the President of Partner and Industry Platforms for Google Cloud at Google, where he oversaw operating and customer-based initiatives to accelerate growth across all lines of business, including analytics and machine learning. Mr. Shaukat also previously served as President of Global Customer Operations for Google, where he built and led Google Cloud's go-to-market operations, including sales, customer support and professional services.

In support of Ellipsis Health's AI product evolution and expanding healthcare industry footprint, Richard Socher also joins the company as a strategic investor. Socher will assist in advising of the machine-learning capabilities and algorithms that assess patient speech through cloud-based deep learning models for automated assessment of anxiety and depression symptoms.

About Ellipsis Health

Ellipsis Health has pioneered an artificial intelligence-powered, speech-based vital sign to quantify and manage depression and anxiety symptoms at scale. With depression and anxiety symptoms impacting one third of Americans and costing the global society over $1 trillion dollars each year, Ellipsis Health's integrated behavioral health solution helps healthcare providers and payors reliably identify and evaluate high-risk patient populations. Machine-learning algorithms assess patient speech through cloud-based deep learning models and generate an automated assessment of anxiety and depression symptoms for clinical decision support. To learn more about the HIPAA-compliant platform facilitating behavioral health screening or longitudinal monitoring of symptoms for depression and anxiety, please visit www.ellipsishealth.com or contact Susan Solinsky, Chief Growth Officer, [email protected].

SOURCE Ellipsis Health