DPhil and Funding Successes

Three cheers for CHI Lab's newest graduate: Dr. Farah Shamout successfully defended her thesis, on the subject of novel deep architectures for predicting deterioration across multiple hospital networks. This study used some of the world's largest available datasets of their kind, comprising routinely-acquired data from the Oxford University Hospitals and Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trusts, which took place within the Wellcome Trust-funded "HAVEN" project, led by collaborator Prof. Peter Watkinson.

Farah's thesis showed that deep recurrent networks can learn time-varying patterns from physiological data for improving the "early warning" of deterioration thus provided to clinicians; a special focus of her work was on mechanisms for making the deep networks interpretable, such that the risk scores produced could be explained. Farah now moves on to a faculty position as Assistant Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, her alma mater.

Belated congratulations to Dr. Xiaorong Ding, who has been awarded an early-career project by the EPSRC, within the "FAST Healthcare" stream of funding. This exciting new programme looks at novel wearables-based technologies for improving the care of patients with asthma, and which collaborates with colleagues from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care and Oxford University Hospitals.

The stream of funding aims to support early-career researchers by providing them initial funding to work on a novel problem as an independent investigator, and which then provides assistance in securing follow-on funding after the end of the project, as part of the "EPSRC NetworksPlus" framework. The latter is a large programme between Cambridge University, University College London, and Oxford that aims to bring together researchers in healthcare technologies.

CHI Lab is delighted to announce the award of new major research programmes...

[1] Perhaps the largest (in duration and support) is the announcement of the first Wellcome Trust "Flagship Centre", which joins the CHI Lab to the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This programme is in its first three-year installment, and aims to develop novel data-driven technologies for improving intensive care in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). With a 30-year track record, OUCRU is one of Oxford University's largest overseas medical institutions, led by Prof. Guy Thwaites of the Nuffield Department of Tropical Medicine, with specialism in intensive medicine and infectious disease, among others. This Flagship Centre builds on our five-year collaboration with Prof. Louise Thwaites and her team within OUCRU. Research on this exciting new Wellcome Trust initiative is being led from Oxford by Heloise Greeff, with a CHI Lab team to be appointed in OUCRU.

[2] The ESPRC has announced that it has funded our "AI for Polymer Design" collaboration, led by Prof. Clive Siviour of the Department of Engineering Science; this programme joins AI expertise from CHI Lab along with polymer-design expertise from the team of Prof. Charlotte Williams in the Department of Chemistry, and with materials expertise from Prof. Siviour's lab. This exciting new project aims to support the design of novel polymers using AI in an analogous manner to that in which AI has been shown to improve the design of pharmaceuticals.

...and in other news, Prof. Clifton was recently awarded an "Overseas Leading Talent Award" by the Chinese Government for our work in OSCAR, the Oxford-Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research.