The BRiTE Center led by David Atkins, PhD recently received a competitive renewal grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) to implement a clinical support software tool that uses speech signal processing and computational models – instead of human judgment – to evaluate motivational interviewing (MI) for alcohol and substance use problems. Performance-based feedback using human raters is an effective method for training and supervising counseling approaches for alcohol-related problems, but isn’t feasible in the real-world due to time and cost. Using this new approach, the team hopes to generate feedback on about 4,000 sessions per year for training and quality assurance by year three of the project. NIH RePORT project information