Tasos PapastylianouWe are delighted to announce Tasos Papastylianou as one of our Data Impact Fellows for 2023. In this post Tasos shares a bit about his background, his current work and research and what he hopes to get out of the Fellows scheme.
Background
I am a Research Fellow at the portugal rcs data Institute of Public Health and Wellbeing, at the University of Essex. I got my degree in Medicine at the University of Bristol in 2006, and initially worked as an NHS doctor for two years. At that point, having predicted that the future of Medicine would inevitably come to rely heavily on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence tools, I decided to take a year off from my NHS training, and undertake an MSc in Advanced Computer Science — Machine Learning and Data Mining, also at the University of Bristol. There I discovered my love for Computer Science and AI (not to mention Caramel Macchiatos!) and got to unleash my dormant inner computer scientist.
After some more work in the NHS as a physician, I decided to follow my inner computer-nerd calling and applied for a scholarship to undertake a DPhil in Biomedical Engineering, via the ‘CDT in Healthcare Innovation’ programme at the University of Oxford. My thesis work proved that current validation methods used in medical imaging yield unreliable results, and proposed more reliable alternatives. In addition, as part of that work I also proposed fuzzy methods that allow a clinician to incorporate a layer of clinical explainability on the machine-predicted results.