Author: Anna Antoniadi

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/20

The 27th annual ACM conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) took place in UCD this year. LiSDA members were involved in the organising committee and conference volunteers who made this hybrid version of ITiCSE a huge success! The great talks of the conference were complemented by the extremely fun reception at the Technological University of Dublin (TU Dublin) , excursion at Powerscourt house/gardens, and banquet at Taylor’s Three Rock. A memorable experience!

Group meeting and cake. For all the celebrations that were overdue!

Such an interesting and illuminating experience, taking part in the IDEATE IRELAND 2022 Competition! We are proud to have been among the 10 finalists- a group of brilliant entrepreneurs- and to finally win third place. Congratulations to the entire MetHealth team, and especially, to Dr Fiona McGillicuddy, the leader of the MetHealth project, for the amazing work and pitch!
-Dr Anna Markella Antoniadi

The entire LiSDA group, celebrating the special day of Dr Anna and Dr Lan’s graduation! Congratulations on your huge achievement!

The first “Future You” Summer School post-COVID-19 was concluded today. We really enjoyed the 3 days of workshops with these amazing problem-solvers and we all had a blast!
–Anna Markella Antoniadi (LiSDA) and Ioannis Karvelas

The UCD Future You Summer School is an opportunity for school pupils to experience college life through interactive academic workshops and a variety of social and sports activities alongside other 5th year school pupils who aspire to study at university (more information here).

Although the campus is emptier at this time of the year, as there are no lectures, it was great to see so many people gathering in the O’Brien Centre to celebrate Pride Month!

The Women+ in STEM society in UCD invited post-doc Anna Antoniadi to give a talk about Computer Science in their final outreach session of the year with TY students. It was a great experience, and, according to the student’s feedback, they really enjoyed the programme, including the workshops but also the talks at the end! LiSDA members are frequently taking part in outreach activities to encourage girls to pursue a career in Computer Science or STEM in general and we are looking forward to the next opportunity!

International Women’s Day, Tuesday 8th March 2022 is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women – while also marking a call to action for accelerating gender equality.
In the field of Computer Science, people often have a stereotyped image of what a computer scientist looks like, the type of work they do and interests they have. We invite everyone to #BreakTheBias.

Celebration day for LiSDA today as Anna Markella Antoniadi and Lan Wei submitted their PhD thesis copies to the Student Desk! Congratulations to both Dr Lan and Dr Anna for a huge achievement and best wishes for the future from the entire LiSDA group!

Anna Markella Antoniadi was interviewed for the “Research Lives” column in the Irish Times. She discussed her work on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and her life as a researcher; academic interests and hobbies, moving to Ireland, completing her PhD.

You can find her interview here.

Congratulations to Anna Markella Antoniadi who successfully passed her PhD viva this afternoon.
Anna’s thesis title is “The Application of Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Modelling Quality of Life and Caregiver Burden in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis to Inform Clinical Decision-Making”.
Many thanks to her examiners, Prof. Pierangelo Veltri, University of Catanzaro, and internal examiner Dr Mark Matthews. Many thanks also to Associate Prof. Gianluca Pollastri for arranging and chairing the viva via zoom, and to Anna’s Research Studies Panel (Prof. Pádraig Cunningham and Dr Marguerite Barry) for their support and guidance of Anna over the last four years. Finally, a big thank you to our collaborators, Prof. Orla Hardiman, Miriam Galvin and Mark Heverin in Trinity College Dublin for closely working with Anna throughout her PhD.

Today is Global Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Awareness day. You can read about our recent work on MND/ALS here: https://www.futureneurocentre.ie/news/als-caregivers-quality-of-life-could-be-predicted-by-computer-systems/

You can find more about #MND in Ireland or donate at http://imnda.ie.

Link to post

[pdf-embedder url=”https://lisda.ucd.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/publication.pdf”]

An article on our BMJ Open paper “Prediction of caregiver burden in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: a machine learning approach using random forests applied to a cohort study” was published on “ALS News Today“!

Anna Markella Antoniadi attended the ACM SAC 2021 virtual conference and presented our work on the “Development of an Explainable Clinical Decision Support System for the Prediction of Patient Quality of Life in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis” at the Health Informatics Track of the Conference. This work is a collaboration with Miriam Galvin, Mark Heverin and Orla Hardiman and it is a work towards the development of the first Clinical Decision Support System to automatically predict the Quality of Life (QoL) of people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, easily and quickly, in order for clinicians to decide on the necessary supports. We found that the predictors of patient QoL are their age at disease onset, orthopnoea score, as well as their primary caregiver’s employment status before the disease onset. More details can be found in our paper in the proceedings.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://lisda.ucd.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ACM-SAC-2021-FIRST-SLIDE.pdf” title=”ACM-SAC 2021 FIRST SLIDE”]

Anna Markella Antoniadi attended the online conference between 30 Nov and 2 Dec 2020. She presented a poster titled “Identifying Features That Are Predictive of Quality of Life in People With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis”, co-authored by Miriam Galvin, Mark Heverin, Orla Hardiman and Catherine Mooney. A great variety of attendees, talks and workshops made this online conference a lovely experience nonetheless.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://lisda.ucd.ie/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ICHI-2020-poster.pdf” title=”ICHI 2020 poster”]

Anna Markella Antoniadi, Lan Wei and Yuhan Du were all awarded scholarships to attend the ACM Celebration of Women in Computing WomENcourage 2019 in Rome, Italy.

They participated in the hackathon, presented their posters and met lots of great women from the field of Computer Science. The first day of the hackathon was long and tiring but a great experience and the first step to making new friends! The conference was full of interesting talks and presentations and Rome was just the loveliest place to be!

— Anna Markella Antoniadi

I was thrilled to attend for the first time the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) on June 26-29, 2019. I learned a lot at the Tutorial on Evaluation of Prediction Models in Medicine and the workshop on Transparent, Explainable and Affective AI in Medical Systems (TEAAM). And what a lovely group of scientists I met! I hope to see everyone again at AIME 2021 in Porto, Portugal!

P.S. You know you enjoyed it when you absolutely forgot to take pictures!

— Anna Markella Antoniadi

Exciting stuff happening at the UCD School of Computer Science! So happy to have the opportunity to help these girls get creative using code and Micro:bits! Winning the :MOVE mini buggies dancing competition was the cherry on top! Congratulations girls! It was indeed As Easy as pi.

— Anna Markella Antoniadi and Catherine Mooney