Computer Science News

Janaina Mourao-Miranda delivers inaugural lecture on machine learning

(L-R: Professor John Shawe-Taylor, Professor Janaina Mourao-Miranda and Professor Daniel Alexander)

On Thursday 28 September Professor Janaina Mourao-Miranda delivered her inaugural lecture on the topic, ‘Mental Health through the lens of Machine Learning applied to Neuroimaging’.

Addressing a crowd of over 60 guests at the Sir David Davies lecture hall at UCL, the newly promoted Professor discussed her research and the examples where machine learning is being used to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of psychiatric disorders – specifically using brain scans. Her presentation included machine learning models that could help to map a brain-behaviour mental health space, which may improve psychiatric diagnostic classification and help identify people at risk of developing a mental health condition.

Her lecture was attended by senior members of the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Neurology, along with her colleagues from the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC), industry representatives and students. Head of Department Professor John Shawe-Taylor gave the opening address at the lecture, which closed with a vote from thanks from Professor Daniel Alexander, the director of the CMIC.

Since 2005, Professor Mourao-Miranda has consistently pioneered the field of machine learning in neuroimaging. Her successful career and being awarded competitive funding to sustain her research is a clear indication of her achievements in this field.

Professor Mourao-Miranda has a background in Electronic Engineering. She then obtained an MSc degree in Computer Science in 1998 and a PhD in Neuroscience in 2002, both from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Her PhD thesis involved an investigation of how emotional stimuli modulate the activity of the visual cortex, which consequently won the prize for the best PhD thesis of the Institute of Biophysics in the year of 2002.

After a period of postdoctoral work at the Department of Neural Computation at Siemens in Munich from 2003–2005 and at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London from 2005–2009, Professor Mourao-Miranda was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship (2009) and a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship (2013). Both fellowships were to further develop her research at the Computer Science Department at UCL.

Over the past years, her research has involved developing and applying machine learning approaches to neuroimaging data, in particular focusing on neuroimaging based diagnostic and prognostic models.

Her current research focuses on developing machine-learning models to investigate the complex relationships between neuroimaging data and multidimensional descriptions of mental health disorders.

Professor Mourao-Miranda’s lecture was recorded in full and is available below. To view the photographs from the event, visit the Department of Computer Science Facebook page.

To read more about Professor Janaina Mourao-Miranda’s work or to get in touch visit her profile on the UCL IRIS website

Full lecture of Professor Janaina Mourao Miranda: Mental Health through the lens of Machine Learning applied to Neuroimaging


Posted 10 Oct 17 08:37
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