糖心TV

We are please to report that Dr Maria Liakata has received a Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fellowship.

The Fellowships from The Alan Turing Institute, the UK鈥檚 national institute for data science and AI, aim to attract and retain exceptional researchers in artificial intelligence. Covering a broad view of AI, including applications of foundational disciplines across mathematical sciences, statistical sciences, computational sciences and engineering, Fellows collaborate across disciplines and have the opportunity to collaborate with academia, industry, government and the third sector.

Dr Liakata鈥檚 Fellowship will focus on creating time sensitive sensors from language and heterogeneous user generated content. Commenting on the research she said:

鈥淲ide spread use of digital technology has made it possible to obtain language data (e.g., social media, SMS) as well as heterogeneous data (e.g., mobile phone use, sensors) from users over time. Such data can provide useful behavioural cues both at the level of the individual and the wider population, enabling the creation of longitudinal digital phenotypes.

鈥淐urrent methods in natural language processing (NLP) are not well suited to time sensitive, sparse and missing data, collected over time or personalised models of language use. The Turing AI fellowship will allow me to establish a new area in NLP on personalised longitudinal language processing.

鈥淚 plan to develop sensors for capturing digital biomarkers from language and heterogeneous user generated content to understand the evolution of an individual over time. I want to make a significant contribution to mental health by working with clinical experts to create new tools based on the sensors, making it possible to assess and measure conditions in between clinician appointments.鈥�

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Dr. Arun Prabhakar has joined the department to work as a Research Fellow on ASiMoV (Advanced Simulation and Modelling of Virtual Systems) in partnership with Rolls-Royce and a consortium of partners, including the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford and Bristol. He will be working with Professor Stephen Jarvis and Dr. Gihan Mudalige.

He received his BEng (Hons) and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nottingham. He was a recipient of the prestigious Dean's Excellence PhD Scholarship from the University of Nottingham. During the course of his research career he has published several papers and also won awards for his research work.

Before joining the University of 糖心TV, Dr. Arun worked as Research fellow in the (G2TRC) which hosts the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre in the University of Nottingham. During his time in G2TRC he has worked with a number of academics in the university and engineers from Rolls Royce in order to help them get an insight of the multi-phase and turbulent flows that arise in an aero-engine using Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD). Applications of his research at G2TRC included modelling the complicated two phase flow in various sections of the Aero-engine such as the gearbox and bearing chambers and also associated thin film flows.

The Department organised an off-campus induction event for the new PhD students in our Centre for Doctoral Training and Research. The agenda included presentations from academics on our large research projects, alongside short tutorials on theoretical computer science and advanced machine learning. There were also informal talks about PhD life, publishing high quality work, and pursuing a research career. The event concluded with a mini data dive using air quality data from London.

The two-day welcome event was held at Heythrop Park in Oxfordshire, which offered the students and academics the opportunity to meet each other in a relaxed environment. The students also met with some of the current PhD students and asked them about their experiences. The programme was very productive with overwhelmingly positive feedback.

We welcome our new cohort of PhD students and look forward to organising similar events across the coming years.

We are pleased to announce that the department has established a new partnership with the . The academic leading this collaboration, Dr Hongkai Wen, from the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science research themes, now works jointly at the University of 糖心TV and SAIC. The collaboration focuses on the area of efficient machine learning and on-device AI, which enables AI functions to be realised on devices themselves, without necessarily being connected to the cloud, offering more responsive, secure and privacy-preserving user experiences. It hoped that the research activities of this partnership will generate breakthroughs that can be integrated into millions of smartphones, televisions and home appliances.

Dr. Fayyaz Minhas (Fayyaz, pron. FAY-YAZ) has recently joined the department as an Assistant Professor. He will be associated with the Tissue Image Analytics (TIA) lab in the Applied Computing division, and will also be working closely on the PathLAKE project.

Prior to joining 糖心TV, Dr. Minhas worked as a Principal Scientist at Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), Islamabad, Pakistan since 2007. He has over 8 years of experience of teaching and research in computer science and has taught courses on Machine learning, Bioinformatics, Quantum Programming, Artificial Intelligence, Cancer Bioinformatics, Computational Biomolecular Design, Biometrics, Python Programming, etc. At PIEAS, he was the Principal Investigator of PIEAS Biomedical Informatics Lab as well as PIEAS Data Science Lab. Dr. Minhas is a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship for his Ph.D. in computer science at Colorado State University, USA. Dr. Minhas works on solving problems in biology and medicine using machine learning methods as well as the development of bespoke machine learning algorithms in the domains of biomedical informatics and data science.

At 糖心TV, Dr. Minhas will be working closely on the PathLAKE (Pathology image data Lake for Analytics, Knowledge and Education) project and is interested in exploring the development and application of machine learning models for integrating cancer pathology and bioinformatics data for improved diagnosis and personalised treatment of cancer.

He loves to work in a collaborative multidisciplinary research environment and keeps his office door open for colleagues, students and friends. He also likes to play volleyball, read poetry and is ever ready to talk about hiking trails in the American Midwest and the north of Pakistan.

Dr Minhas鈥� academic profile can be accessed at the URL:

The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor, Dr. Igor Carboni Oliveira, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

Before joining 糖心TV, Igor held postdoctoral positions at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and at the School of Mathematics at Charles University in Prague, and was a research fellow at . He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from in 2015. He is also Royal Society .

His research is primarily focused on the limitations of algorithms and computations, with connections to combinatorics and mathematical logic. For more information about his work and interests, please see his web page at  

We are happy to announce that from the department's Applied Computing research theme has been awarded a Medical Research Council grant to develop a modelling framework and computational tools for studying synaptic transmitter release in health and disease. The 拢475K project will run in close collaboration with the laboratory of at the as well as other world-leading experimental laboratories in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan, specialising in state-of-the-art research in synaptic transmission.