18 January 2021
https://meet.google.com/uys-jkwm-szq
5.30pm
On Monday, January 18 our MSc programme had the pleasure of hosting online Dr. Natasha Antropova and Dr. Yannis Assael from DeepMind, who gave two guest lectures on exciting research and career inspiration, entitled “From Medical Physics Research to DeepMind: Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosis” and “From Thessaloniki to London’s DeepMind” respectively. Their exciting talks were attended by more than 60 students and faculty members from our MSc and beyond. We learned many interesting things and got inspired by their passion, achievements and life trajectories.
Talk summaries and short CVs of our speakers follow.
From Medical Physics Research to DeepMind: Deep Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosis: In this talk, I will share my research journey starting from the undergraduate time and ending at DeepMind. I will also include more technical details of the research I have done in the breast cancer space within a joint DeepMind and Google effort.
Dr. Natasha Antropova is a Research Engineer at DeepMind working on developing Artificial Intelligence solutions for scientific questions. In 2014, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA, with an honours B.S. degree in applied mathematics and physics and with a minor degree in electrical engineering. Her undergraduate research focused on developing methods for fetal position tracking using ultrasound. After graduating from Madison, Natasha started her Ph.D. in medical physics at the University of Chicago. In her research she developed deep learning methods for breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis based on magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and mammography images. She started as a research engineer at DeepMind in 2019, where she joined a research group tackling the problem of breast cancer diagnosis using deep learning and mammography. Currently Natasha works on the protein folding project.
From Thessaloniki to London’s DeepMind: I’m going to talk about my journey from studying in Thessaloniki to working in one of the world’s leading research labs for Artificial Intelligence. Furthermore, I will present research questions we are trying to answer nowadays, and share my views on interesting future directions of the field.
Dr. Yannis Assael is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind working on Artificial Intelligence. In 2013, he graduated from the Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia. With full-scholarships, he did an MSc at the University of Oxford, where he received the Tony Hoare Prize for the best overall performance, and an MRes at Imperial College London. In 2016, he went back to Oxford for a DPhil (PhD) degree with an Oxford – Google DeepMind scholarship. Within the first year, after a series of research breakthroughs and entrepreneurial activities, he started as a researcher at Google DeepMind in parallel with his studies. Throughout this time his research has attracted the attention of the media several times (BBC, Reuters, The Times, Financial Times) and focuses on moonshot projects from solving audio-visual speech recognition, to using text-to-speech for ALS patients, and utilising AI to restore damaged ancient Greek texts revolutionising Ancient History research.