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The VAST Summer Program encompasses a series of workshops and seminars targeted to undergraduate trainees in the field of VCI to help with overall VCI knowledge, research skills, and networking. While targeted to undergraduates, all are welcome to attend. This series is coordinated by our VAST Trainee Curriculum Committee members.
It culminates in the VAST Summer Student Symposium where the students have the opportunity to share the work that they’ve been doing over the last few months.
We are excited to have Dr. Helena Balabin join us as our keynote speaker for this year’s Summer Student Symposium. Her talk, titled "Connected Speech in Alzheimer's Disease: Towards Digital Twin Models of Vascular Modulators", starts with her work on detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) from connected speech and extends it to speech markers of vascular cognitive impairment (VCI). It then turns to a central difficulty: the high prevalence of mixed AD and cerebrovascular pathologies, and why speech measures alone struggle to properly characterize that overlap. This challenge motivates future research on subject-level digital twins built from vision-language models, in which targeted lesions to the models simulate the effects of AD and cerebrovascular pathologies.
Helena Balabin is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medical Image Processing and Machine Learning Laboratory (MIPLab) at the University of Calgary. Previously, she was an interdisciplinary PhD student and Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) fellow at the departments of Neurosciences and Computer Science at KU Leuven in Belgium, and a visiting student at the University of Alberta & the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) in Edmonton, with work spanning clinical AI for dementia detection from speech, the neural mechanisms of compositional language processing, and representational alignment between AI models and human neural data.
View the VAST 2026 Summer Student Symposium program here.
Interested in attending? Register to be part of the VAST network via the link at the top of the page.