Staff

Professor Yike Guo

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Professor Yike Guo Co-director
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Professor Yike Guo is the Institute's first Director. He holds a position in the Department of Computing as leader of the Discovery Science Group and is currently seconded to the Hong Kong Baptist University as Vice-President (Research and Development).
Dr Mark Kennedy

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Dr Mark Kennedy Co-director
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Dr Mark Kennedy is Co-director of the DSI since 2019. He is also Associate Professor of Strategy and Organisations at the Business School.
Dr Wenjia Bai

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Dr Wenjia Bai Lecturer jointly at the DSI and the Department of Medicine
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Dr Wenjia Bai is a lecturer jointly at DSI and Dept of Medicine, Imperial College London. His research focuses on developing novel image computing and machine learning algorithms for medical image analysis and applying the algorithms to clinical research. Currently, he is actively involved in the UK Biobank Project and UK Digital Heart Project.
Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

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Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye Senior Lecturer jointly at the DSI and the Department of Computing
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Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing and Research fellow at the Data Science Institute where he heads the Computational Privacy Group. Yves-Alexandre has been a Special Adviser to EC Commissioner Vestager.

Institute Management Team

	Florian Guitton Data centre operations manager Send e-mail	Florian manages the networking and data centre operations at the DSI. In 2012 he joined the Discovery Sciences Group at Imperial College London where he became Research Assistant working on iHealth and eTRIKS programs.
	Ping Huang Events manager and executive manager for China collaborations Send e-mail	Ping has recently been appointed the DSI Events Manager. She is responsible for the organization and delivery of DSI events, including Distinguished Lecture Series, Seminar Series, Annual Lecture Series, as well as supporting conferences, workshops and public engagement activities. As Executive Manager (China Collaboration) at the DSI, Ping coordinates the operational and research project management of the Joint Lab for Applied Data Science (Lab) between Imperial College and Zhejiang University (ZJU) . She is central to the consolidation of the ever growing relationship of the DSI with Chinese academic/ industrial partnerships.
	Amandeep Bahia Research group administrator Send e-mail	Amandeep supports the day-to-day running of the Data Science Institute in terms of finance, HR and general office management.
	Oliver Nixon System administrator Send e-mail	Oliver joined the Data Science Institute in June 2021. He is responsible for maintaining the cloud environment for the DSI.
	Dr Kai Sun Acting operations manager Send e-mail	Kai is responsible for operational management of the DSI, supporting the Co-Directors to run the day to day operations and liaising with internal teams to deliver compelling propositions across a portfolio of activities including research, education, innovation and recruitment. In addition to working as the Acting Operations Manager, she also manages several translational research projects in the DSI, such as the IMI 2 IDEA-FAST project. Kai joined the DSI in 2014 as a Research Associate after she obtained her PhD in Computing from Imperial College London with Professor Yike Guo.
	Andrianirina Rakotoharisoa Systems administrator Send e-mail	Andria is the Systems Administrator at the Data Science Institute, where he started after completing his MSc in Computer Science at the École Centrale de Nantes in France. Andria's main role at the DSI is to assist in the maintenance and the improvement of the Data Observatory, Visual Corridor and the DSI Cloud.
	Gemma Ralton Communications Officer Send e-mail	Gemma is the Communications Officer for the DSI and is responsible for all internal and external communications including website content, digital publications, and social media. She joined Imperial in 2020 to undertake a masters course in science communication before joining the DSI.

Research Staff

	Dr Rossella Arcucci Research fellow Send e-mail	Rossella is a research fellow in data analysis. The main topic of her research is data assimilation and/with machine learning, applied to several case studies. Her areas of expertise are numerical analysis, scientific computing, and the development of methods, algorithms and software for scientific applications on high-performance architectures including parallel and distributed computing. At the DSI, she leads and coordinates the activities of the DataLearning Working Group and supervises MSc students and early career researchers.
	Berke Doğa Başaran Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Doğa is a postgraduate researcher pursuing a PhD in the AI4Health CDT studying Multiple Sclerosis brain lesion segmentation using machine learning. He is affiliated jointly to the Data Science Institute and the BioMedIA Group, supervised by Dr Wenjia Bai and Professor Paul Matthews. Doğa obtained his MSc in Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and his MEng at the University of Oxford.
	Dr Sibo Cheng Research associate Send e-mail	Sibo started working as a Research Assistant in November 2020. His research combines data assimilation and machine learning algorithms for predicting dynamical systems with the application to wildfire forecasting. He recently completed his PhD at Paris-Saclay University, in cooperation with EDF R&D, under the supervision of Dr Didier Lucor. He is also broadly interested in a large range of problematics in applied mathematics, computational geoscience and machine learning (graph theory, data compression for dynamical systems, covariance estimation, etc).
	Ana-Maria Crețu Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Ana-Maria is a postgraduate researcher in the Computational Privacy Group affiliated to the Data Science Institute, pursuing her PhD in machine learning for re-identification. She graduated from the École Polytechnique, France and holds an MSc in computer science from EPFL, Switzerland.
	Ibrahim Emam Research associate Send e-mail	Ibrahim is a research associate leading the development of the Translational medicine data management platform (PlatformTM). Before that, he was a senior software engineer in the Functional Genomics group at the European Bioinformatics Institute developing the Gene Expression Atlas and ArrayExpress2. He received his MSc in bioinformatics from the University of Oxford and his double major BSc in computer science and biology from the American University in Cairo, Egypt. His working experience revolves around bioinformatics application design and development, large-scale data management and analysis, data standardization, modeling, and visualisation.
	Florian Guitton Research associate Send e-mail	Florian manages the networking and data centre operations at the DSI. In 2012 he joined the Discovery Sciences Group at Imperial College London where he worked on iHealth and eTRIKS programs, among others. Florian is also undertaking a PhD under the supervision of Professor Yi-Ke Guo.
	Andrea Gadotti Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Andrea has an MSc in mathematical logic from the University of Turin, Italy and is currently working on his PhD in the Computational Privacy Group. His research aims at formalizing privacy guarantees with purely mathematical models such as differential privacy. This enables him to disclose vulnerabilities in current data release systems and to design safer solutions.
	Florimond Houssiau Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Florimond received his MSc in applied mathematics from UCLouvain. He his now a PhD researcher in the Computational Privacy Group. His research interests include obfuscation as a solution for privacy on the Web, the impact of network effects on privacy and other privacy-related topics. He has recently finished a 3-month internship at Google in Zurich, Switzerland.
	Shubhan Jain Research assistant Send e-mail	Shubham is a research assistant working towards his PhD in the Computational Privacy Group. He received his BTech from IIT Bombay in computer science and engineering in 2016. He was a founding member of Qure.ai, a startup developing deep learning solutions for the health sector. His research interests include building secure and privacy enabling systems at scale, wifi security and fairness in algorithmic decision making.
	Nazanin Zounemat Kermani Research associate Send e-mail	Nazanin is lead data analyst of the PIONEER project (https://prostate-pioneer.eu), a European Network of Excellence for Big Data in Prostate Cancer, consisting of 32 partners across 9 countries. She started her PhD at Imperial College in 2013 supervised by Professors Zoltan Takats and Yike Guo. She has worked as data analyst on the U-BIOPRED project (Unbiased BIOmarkers in PREDiction of respiratory disease outcomes), a European research project that uses medical data of adults and children to investigate different types of asthma and ensure better diagnosis and prognosis. She is interested in the clinical aspects of machine learning, combining and analysing patients' records and omics data to better understand disease mechanisms.
	Dr K S Sesh Kumar Research fellow Send e-mail	Dr K S Sesh Kumar is a research fellow in machine learning. His research interests are on scalable solutions to submodular optimisation, Bayesian optimisation and Bayesian nonparametrics. He finished his doctoral studies at ENS/INRIA, Paris, under the supervision of Professor Francis Bach in 2016. He was a post doctoral researcher in the Kolmogorov Group, IST, Austria, headed by Professor Vladimir Kolmogorov until October 2017. He joined Imperial College London in December 2017 as a Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence research fellow for the Trust and Transparency project in the Statistical Machine Learning group before joining the DSI in August 2019.
	Jake Lever Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Jake is based in the Data Science Institute, supported by the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment, and the Department of Life Sciences. His PhD project focusses on using machine learning algorithms in data assimilation processes to improve the efficiency and accuracy of wildfire predictions, and social sentiment analysis in the context of wildfires.
	Ryan Ong Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Ryan is a postgraduate researcher pursuing his PhD under the supervision of Professor Yi-Ke Guo. He is supported by a Royal Bank of Canada scholarship and his work is at the intersection of finance and computer science, specifically financial knowledge graphs. His research interests include natural language processing, knowledge graphs, informational retrieval, and data science. He holds an MSc in Computer Science from Imperial College London and a BSc in Economics from the University of Bath and has worked at multiple startups and large corporates as a data scientist.
	Dr César Quilodran Casas Research associate Send e-mail	César is part of the team behind the Managing Air in Green Inner Cities (MAGIC) project, an EPSRC collaborative project between the University of Cambridge, University of Surrey and Imperial College London. His work focuses on fast data assimilation with machine learning methods to analyse air pollution data. He obtained his PhD in physics at Imperial College London under the supervision of professor Ralf Toumi.
	Pierre Richemond Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Pierre's PhD research is in deep reinforcement learning. He also helps to run the Deep Learning Network and organises thematic reading groups at the DSI. Prior to that, he has worked in electronics as a research engineer and in quantitative finance as a trader. He has studied electrical engineering at ENST, probability theory and stochastic processes at Université Paris VI - École Polytechnique, and business management at HEC. His other research interests include neural network theory and stochastic optimization methods.
	Dr Fernando Rosas Research fellow Send e-mail	Fernando works jointly at the DSI and at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at the Department of Brain Sciences. His research lays at the interface between computational neuroscience, complexity science, and information theory. His main interest is to develop novel, principled data-driven methods to differentiate and quantify various types of interdependency, and to apply these methods to deepen our understanding of complex dynamical systems - with a focus on the human brain, and human-to-human interaction. Fernando received his BA degree in music composition and philosophy (Minor), a BSc degree in mathematics, and an MS and PhD degree in engineering sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile. He worked as postdoctoral research assistant in the Departement Elektrotechniek (ESAT) of KU Leuven, Belgium, as postdoctoral fellow in the Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering of the National Taiwan University, and as Marie Curie research fellow in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London.
	Dr Ovidiu Șerban Research fellow Send e-mail	At the DSI, Ovidiu focuses on modern data science techniques, including large scale visualisation and realtime natural language processing. His research interests and expertise also include natural language processing, machine learning, affective computing, and interactive system design.
	Mihai Șuteu Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Mihai is a postgraduate researcher, working on PhD under the supervision of professor Yike Guo. His research topic is deep learning on time series. His further interests are in representation learning, curriculum learning, and neuroevolution.
	Guanyu Tao Research assistant Send e-mail	Guanyu Tao works on the IDEA-FAST project contributing to data management platform and analytical environment developed and hosted by Imperial College London. His research interests include data analysis, deep learning and data management.
	Arnaud Tournier Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Arnaud is a postgraduate researcher completing his PhD under the supervision of Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye in the Computational Privacy Group affiliated to the Data Science Institute. His research currently focuses on machine learning for biometric and behavioral identification. He holds an MRes from Sorbonne (UPMC) in applied mathematics, an MSc from Paris-Sud in pure mathematics and an engineering diploma (Centralien) from École Centrale, Paris. In 2013 he was a national finalist in France for the International Physics Olympiads.
	Siyao Wang Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Siyao is a postgraduate researcher working under the supervision of professor Yi-ke Guo. He works in the IDEA-FAST project contributing to data management platform developed and hosted by Imperial College London. His research interests includes data management, data analysis and deep learning.
	Xiaoyu Zhang Research assistant Send e-mail	Xiaoyu is a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher joining a PhD programme under the supervision of professor Yi-Ke Guo. He works on the MSCA-ITN-2017 project "An Integrated Platform for Developing Brain Cancer Diagnostic Techniques" to develop big sensing intelligent warehouse for translation and clinical diagnosis study.
	Jingqing Zhang Postgraduate researcher Send e-mail	Jingqing is a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Computing, pursuing his PhD under the supervision of professor Yi-Ke Guo. His research interest includes text mining, multimodality, deep learning and data science. He is supported by a LexisNexis HPCC scholarship.
	Weihang Zhang Postgraduate researcher	Weihang is a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Computing, working on his PhD supervised by Professor Yi-ke Guo. His PhD is sponsored by Royal Bank of Canada, and his research is focused on knowledge graph, natual language processing and their applications in finance. Weihang obtained his master's degree in Computational Science and Engineering at Harvard University, and his bachelor's degree in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to his PhD, Weihang worked as a strategist at Goldman Sachs for two years.

Alumni

	Dr Francis Bunnin	Francis Oliver Bunnin worked at the DSI prior to his current role at The Alan Turing Institute where he is researching Bayesian data science approaches to combatting violent and exploitative crime. He completed his PhD at Imperial with Professors Yike Guo and John Darlington. Apart from academic research he worked for 20 years in financial data analysis, software development, and primarily rates trading managing multi-billion USD exotic derivative and multi-currency proprietary portfolios through and beyond the financial crisis. He is interested in the theory and practice of decision making under uncertainty, stochastic processes, multi-objective Reinforcement Learning, social choice and preference theory, Graphical and network models, agent based modelling and micro-foundations of macro systems in economics and society. He enjoys swimming, walking in nature and bringing up his family.
	Dr Anna Cupani	Anna's responsibility at the DSI was for internal and external communication strategy, designs and facilitates workshops, and supports cross-college as well as external collaborations in various capacities. She supports grants applications, promotes collaborations within Imperial and with external partners, and coordinates the DSI Fellows network. She brought to the DSI years of experience in research, both in academia and in industry, as well as in foresighting techniques, communication, outreach and engagement, teaching and facilitation techniques. She holds a degree in Chemistry, a MSc in Molecular Sciences and a PhD in Process Chemistry obtained jointly at Imperial College London, Johnson and Johnson, and VITO.
	Dr Senaka Fernando	Senaka worked as Systems Architect for the Data Observatory undertaking the design and development of its architecture and underlying systems. He was part of the DSI infrastructure group to maximise the use of the DO as a research environment within the Data Science Institute. Senaka has 10 years of industry experience working as a solutions architect in the enterprise middleware domain and completed his PhD in the Department of Computing under the supervision of professor Yike Guo in 2020. He is currently working at WSO2 as Senior Director - Technology Evangelism.
	Dr Julia Ive	Julia is a research fellow in Natural Language Processing working on a range of text generation problems. She also works on synthetic medical data to address the data accessibility issue in the clinical domain.
	Yuanhan Mo (Max)	Yuanhan is a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Computing, enrolled in a PhD programme under the supervision of professor Yi-Ke Guo. His research interests include machine learning and medical image analysis. Yuanhan recently received the young scientist award at the premier Medical Imaging conference MICCAI 2018. Since leaving the DSI, Yuanhan has pursued a postdoc at the University of Oxford.
	Dr James Scott-Brown	James joined the DSI having completed his PhD at Oxford University. He worked on large scale visualisations for the DSI Data Observatory completeing a project on healthcare data with Dr Ceire Costelloe and upgrading the interface for the use of the observatory by presenters. Since leaving the DSI James, has joined the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford.
	Dr Pan Wang	Pan worked jointly on her PhD at the DSI and the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London under the supervision of professors Yi-Ke Guo and Peter Childs. She graduated in 2021.
	Dr Shuo Wang	Shuo joined the DSI as a Research Associate in 2019 working on the SmartHeart project. The project aims to develop an integrated approach for cardiovascular MR imaging (cMRI) reconstruction, image analysis and clinical interpretation. His research interests include developing machine learning methods for biomedical image analysis and clinical assessment. Shuo left the DSI at the beginning of March 2021 to take up a faculty position at Fudan University, China.
	Dr Nguyen Truong	Nguyen received his PhD and Masters degrees from Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom and Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea in 2018 and 2013, respectively. He was a software engineer at DASAN Networks, a leading company on Networking Products and Services in Korea from 2012 to 2015. His research interests are in the area of security, privacy and trust in the Internet of Things, blockchain technology, personal information management, and cloud computing. Since leaving the DSI Nguyen has joined the University of Glasgow, School of Computing as a lecturer.
	Dr Ali Farzaneh Far	Ali's research focused on quantifying the impact of algorithmic decision making on society. Today, rich data sets of human behaviour are collected, catalogued, and used for targeting and personalised services. Ali studied the effect of the tools used to leverage such data sets, on their host markets and on society at large. A second area of interest is the study of the limits of privacy in the context of large scale human behavioural datasets. Ali holds an MSc in high energy particle physics jointly from the University of Southampton and CERN and completed his PhD in the Computational Privacy Group affiliated to the Data Science Institute.
	Dr Philip Nadler	Philip completed his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Prof. Yike Guo. His research was on parameter learning in time series with a focus on combining model- and data driven methods for predictions and inference. He also worked in the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research as well as the Data Observatory where he conducted research on digital currencies and applications of DLT technology. After finishing his postgraduate research he worked in the financial industry and joined the European Central Bank (ECB) where he is contributing to building the first prototype of the Digital Euro.
	Dr Hao Dong	Hao Dong is an assistant professor at Peking University studying AI, robotics and vision. He has a broad interest in the generalisation problem using generative models and self-supervised learning. He lead several open source communities, e.g., TensorLayer and OpenMLsys, and won the Best Open Source Software Award at ACM Multimedia 2017. Previously, Hao obtained Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London under the supervision of Yike Guo in fall 2019. Before Ph.D., he received a MSc specialist degree (visual information processing) with distinction from Imperial, and a first-class BEng degree from the University of Central Lancashire. He founded a startup for brain-computer interface with Yike Guo between 2012 and 2014.

Honorary Research Fellows

	Dr Miguel Molina-Solana	Miguel worked at the DSI as Marie Curie Research Fellow. His research is at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction. In his current research project, DATASOUND, he explores the opportunities that sound offers in the context of modern data science. Miguel also collaborated with several researchers at Imperial College and worldwide in particular on business analytics and energy management. He is now based at the University of Granada.
	Dr Axel Oehmichen	Axel did his PhD research under the supervision of professor Guo and then went on to co-found Secretarium (https://secretarium.com/) a start-up where he covers the role of Chief Data Science Officer. He is applying his knowledge in distributed computing and privacy to build a confidential computing platform to simplify the setup and integration of privacy-respecting applications in finance and life scienc
	Dr Xian Yang	From 2012 to 2018 Xian worked as research associate at the Data Science Institute. During this period, she took part in many cross-European research projects, such as UBIOPRED (severe asthma subtyping), eTRIKS (knowledge management platform for translational medicine), Optimise (multiple sclerosis disease prognosis and treatment) and iHealth (clinical treatment pathway optimisation). In these projects she developed machine learning methods to analyse and construct predictive models from Omics, clinical and survey data. From 2018 to 2019, she worked at Microsoft Research Asia on data intelligence for cloud systems. She is now assistant professor in Computing at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
	Dr Luc Rocher	Luc Rocher is a lecturer in social data science at the Oxford Internet Institute, specialising in large-scale computational modelling approaches to study emerging concerns in algorithmic societies. With training in computer science and computational social science, Luc studies the future of privacy and digital rights as well as the governance of algorithms in digital platforms.
	Dr Chengliang Dai	Chengliang worked on a joint initiative between the Data Science Institute and the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics to develop a translational platform for analysis of brain imaging datasets held in the UK Biobank. He acquired his PhD in computer science from the University of York in 2016 and joined the DSI in 2018. His research interests include biomedical data processing, time series analysis and deep learning in medical image analysis. Since leaving the DSI Chengliang is working for UCB BIOPHARMA as a Principal Data Scientist. His job will be developing advanced AI solutions for translating patient data into knowledge to improve patient/disease understanding and diagnostics/treatments for disease.