Parkland school shooting survivor develops Joy, an app built on AI that helps people heal

abcnews.go.com:

Kai Koerber was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman murdered 14 students and three staff members on Valentine’s Day in 2018

Kai Koerber was a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman murdered 14 students and three staff members there on Valentine’s Day in 2018. Seeing his peers — and himself — struggle with returning to normal, he wanted to do something to help people manage their emotions on their own terms.

While some of his classmates at the Parkland, Florida, school have worked on advocating for gun control, entered politics or simply took a step back to heal and focus on their studies, Koerber’s background in technology — he’d originally wanted to be a rocket scientist — led him in a different direction: to build a smartphone app.

The result was Joy, which uses artificial intelligence to suggest bite-sized mindfulness activities for people based on how they are feeling. The algorithm Koerber’s team built is designed to recognize how a person feels from the sound of their voice — regardless of the words or language they speak.

“In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the first thing that came to mind after we’ve experienced this horrible, traumatic event — how are we going to personally recover?” he said. “It’s great to say OK, we’re going to build a better legal infrastructure to prevent gun sales, increased background checks, all the legislative things. But people really weren’t thinking about… the mental health side of things.”

Like many of his peers, Koerber said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for a «very long time» and only recently has it gotten a little better.

“So when I came to Cal, I was like, let me just start a research team that