What do you cover as an engineer?

As an engineer, I specialise in the field of computer science (software engineering). My particular focus is on machine learning which is a branch of artificial intelligence. My research often focuses on applications related to healthcare and ubiquitous forms of data, such as large-scale data obtained by mobile phones or wearable sensors. Some applications of my research include mental health state and mood predictions from large mobile phone datasets, Parkinson’s Disease prediction from keyboard typing behaviour, transfer learning via cascade trained deep neural networks on human activity recognition and medical images, particularly x-rays, as well as digital epidemics.

How are you making a difference to the world through your work?

While my research is varied across applications, there is one topic that has become most relevant recently in light of COVID-19. Some research from several years ago on digital epidemics, which seemed to be the most abstract and disconnected from reality at the time, has become the most relevant and important in light of this pandemic. We had investigated how to incorporate a theoretical contact tracing model in a digital scenario, with simulations and experiments performed over real Bluetooth interaction data as a proxy for physical proximity from phone data. This appears to be the first paper on digital contact tracing.

What do you enjoy about being an engineer?

I enjoy many aspects of engineering life, but the point that tops the list is the ability to work on interesting and complex problems. There is always a new challenge to think about and my role allows me to choose these problems. The second point is that I can work and collaborate with some of the brightest and most interesting researchers and students, and to collaborate internationally. Thirdly, I love the fact that I have been able to travel to interesting places because of conferences and projects, and I'm hopeful that this will be a possibility again soon.