Principal Investigators & Staff
Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision
Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision
Sotirios A. Tsaftaris (Sotos) is currently Chair (Full Professor) in Machine Learning and Computer Vision at the University of Edinburgh. He holds the Canon Medical/Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Healthcare AI (since 2019). Since 2024, he is the Director for the EPSRC-funded Causality in Healthcare AI Hub (CHAI). He is an ELLIS Fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) of Edinburgh’s ELLIS Unit. He is currently serving as an Expert Adviser on AI for Science, for the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT). Since 2023 he is a visiting researcher with Archimedes RC a research centre of excellence in AI in Athens, Greece. Between 2016 and 2023 he was a Turing Fellow with the Alan Turing Institute.
He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, in 2003 and 2006, respectively, and the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2000.
Previously he was an Assistant Professor with IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy and the Director of the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis Unit at IMT. Prior to that, he held a joint Research Assistant Professor appointment at Northwestern University with the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Radiology Feinberg School of Medicine, working closely with colleagues such as Profs. Katsaggelos, Dharmakumar, and Li. He maintained an adjunct appointment with EECS (2011-2015), and an affiliation with the Image and Video Processing Laboratory (IVPL), at Northwestern University, upon his return to Europe.
He has published extensively, particularly in interdisciplinary fields, with more than 200 journal and conference papers in his active record, with a variety of co-authors and collaborators.
While he has served in many technical program committees of international conferences, and he actively reviews papers for several prestigious international journals, most notably he currently is an Associate Editor (AE) for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. He served as an AE for IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (2011-2021) and Elsevier DSP (2014-2018). He was tutorial chair for ECCV 2020. He was Doctoral Symposium Chair for IEEE ICIP 2018 (Athens). He has served as area chair for CVPR 2021, MICCAI 2018 (Granada), ICME 2018 (San Diego), ICCV 2017 (Venice), MMSP 2016 (Montreal), VCIP 2015 (Singapore). He has also co-organized workshops and tutorials for ECCV (2020, 2014), CVPR (2019), ICCV (2017), BMVC (2015), and MICCAI (2016, 2017, 2021).
He is a member of the IEEE, Senior Member, ISMRM, and SCMR.
His work has received several accolades, such as Best Paper Award (STACOM 2017), twice a Magna Cum Laude Award (ISMRM), a finalist for the Early Career Award (SCMR, 2011; SCMR, 2019 (Chartsias as PhD student)), and has had his work appear in journal covers and attract significant media coverage.
Prof. Tsaftaris is also a Murphy Fellow and a Fellow of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.
Short bio for media engagements and seminars including high res photographs in docx format here (it will download a file directly).
Steven McDonagh
Senior Lecturer
Steven McDonagh
Senior Lecturer
Steven McDonagh is a Senior Lecturer in IDCOM, University of Edinburgh where he works on Computer Vision and Machine Learning problems. Recent research directions include multi-modal, multi-task learning and medical imaging applications.
Previously he was a Principal Research Scientist with Huawei R&D, UK and has also held postdoctoral positions with the Biomedical Image Analysis Group, Imperial College London and with Disney Research Zurich. He earned his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour under the supervision of Prof. Bob Fisher for his work on density estimation and multi-view 3D point set registration.
His research interests span topics in Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Medical Image Analysis. You can occasionally find him up a mountain; running or cycling.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Alison O'Neil
Honorary Fellow
Alison O'Neil
Honorary Fellow
Alison O’Neil is a Senior Scientist in the AI Research Team at Canon Medical Research Europe and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
She leads a team of scientists and research students working on machine learning techniques for healthcare applications for medical imaging, natural language processing, and electronic health record data. Her research has covered techniques for medical image registration, segmentation of anatomy and pathology, anatomical landmark detection, and more recently prediction of outcomes from clinical data and the extraction of semantic information from medical text. She is Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and is the main organiser of the ICLR 2020 AI for Affordable Healthcare workshop. She has multiple publications and patents in the domain of medical AI.
Valerio Giuffrida
Assistant Professor in Computer Vision (The University of Nottingham)
Valerio Giuffrida
Assistant Professor in Computer Vision (The University of Nottingham)
Valerio Giuffrida is a Assistant Professor in Computer Vision at The University of Nottingham.
He obtained the Ph.D. from IMT School For Advanced Studies Lucca (supervisor Prof. Sotirios A. Tsaftaris based at the University of Edinburgh). He has published several papers on machine learning and plant phenotyping. Specifically, his first work presented a learning algorithm to count leaves in rosette plants. Then, he matured his research interests on neural networks, particularly on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs). In the 2016, he participated at the enrichment program of The Alan Turing Institute.
Besides his scientific skills, he is an excellent programmer, boasting knowledge in several programming languages. In fact, he is the lead developer of the Phenotiki Analysis Software, which bundles computer vision and machine learning algorithms to analyse rosette plants. During his master, he had the possibility to participate in different scientific summer schools, such as the International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS) and the Medical Imaging Summer School (MISS), which have been of great motivations towards his scientific career.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Michael Camilleri
Post-doctoral Researcher
Michael Camilleri
Post-doctoral Researcher
Michael Camilleri is a Postgraduate Research Associate with CHAI at the University of Edinburgh as well as Associate Staff at the University of Dundee. His research focus is on Probabilistic Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Data Science, with a special interest in applying techniques to clinical data.
Michael obtained a B.Sc. in Communications and Computer Engineering (University of Malta), before coming to Edinburgh to study for an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Subsequently he worked in industry, returning to the University of Edinburgh for a PhD in Data Science, supervised by Prof. Chris Williams: his thesis centred around characterising the coupled and hierarchical nature of social interactions of group-housed lab mice. This also involved a collaboration with Prof. Andrew Zissermann and the VGG group at Oxford towards tracking and behaviour recognition from video.
Apart from a strong technical background in probabilistic modelling and deep learning, Michael has experience in various applied fields, including Robotics, Transport Modelling, Radio-Telescopes, Behaviour Modelling and above all Clinical Imaging (having been a researcher on the SCANDAN project leading to the Brain Health Dataset). He has worked across Industry and Academia, and is the author of several peer-reviewed journal and conference publications. He is also a full-time husband/father and enjoys volunteering at heritage railways (particularly Steam Locomotives).
More information in his personal website.
Damian Machlanski
Post-doctoral Researcher
Damian Machlanski
Post-doctoral Researcher
Damian is a Research Associate in Causal AI at the University of Edinburgh. He works with Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris within the CHAI group (AI Hub for Causality in Healthcare AI with Real Data). His research interests include causality (treatment effect estimation, structure learning) and machine learning (performance evaluation, hyperparameter optimisation, OOD generalisation). Please visit his personal website for more information.
Feng Chen
Post-doctoral Researcher
Feng Chen
Post-doctoral Researcher
Feng is a Post-doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) at The University of Edinburgh. Currently he is working in machine learning/computer vision in agriculture with Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris and Dr. Valerio Giuffrida.
Feng has been working in the intersection between machine learning and agriculture for years. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Nottingham. His PhD was supervised by Prof. Andrew French and Prof. Tony Pridmore, with the thesis titled “Learning with Fewer Labels in Deep Learning for Plant Phenotyping”, and fully funded by The University of Nottingham. He also holds an MSc in Signal Processing and Communications from The University of Edinburgh, with the thesis titled “Citizen Scientists and Machine Learning to Help Feed the World”, supervised by Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris.
Kurt Butler
Post-doctoral Researcher
Kurt Butler
Post-doctoral Researcher
Kurt is a CHAI Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Edinburgh working under the supervision of Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris. His research interests broadly include causality, machine learning and signal processing. Particular topics of interest include causal discovery, Bayesian inference, probabilistic reasoning, explainable machine learning (XAI), and time series. For more details, please visit his personal website.
Panos Dimitrakopoulos
Post-doctoral Researcher
Panos Dimitrakopoulos
Post-doctoral Researcher
Panagiotis (Pano) is a CHAI Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris. His research focuses on building deep learning models, primarily for vision problems, that can we reason about their uncertainty using Bayesian principles. For more details, please visit his personal website.
Zhihua Liu
Post-doctoral Researcher
Zhihua Liu
Post-doctoral Researcher
Zhihua Liu is a Postdoc Research Associate in Causal AI at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris. His research focuses on computer vision and machine learning, with recent interests in causal learning models for visiual reasoning, generating and understanding. For more details, please visit his personal website.
PhD Researchers
Analía Cabello Cano
PhD Student
Analía Cabello Cano
PhD Student
Analía Cabello Cano is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, working under the supervision of Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris. Her research mostly focuses on the development and analysis of causal digital twins in healthcare.
She graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Edinburgh, earning an integrated master’s degree in mathematics, which included a year abroad at the University of Texas at Austin. Additionally, she has been involved with the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study by participating in the Park City Mathematics Institute’s summer program, which centered on number theory informed by computation.
Connor Jordan
PhD Student
Connor Jordan
PhD Student
Connor Jordan is a PhD student at The University of Edinburgh supervised by Dr Athanasios Angeloudis and Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris. His research interests include renewable energy analysis, highly constrained practical optimisation and the application of deep learning techniques to scientific problems.
He holds a master’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Edinburgh. During and following his Master’s degree, Connor was a research assistant to Dr Angeloudis investigating efficient optimisation techniques for tidal stream turbine arrays. Before starting the PhD, Connor interned and worked for a number of structural engineering companies.
Harry Brown
PhD Student
Harry Brown
PhD Student
Harry Brown is an EngD student at the University of Edinburgh and Canon Medical Research Europe supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris and Dr Sonia Dahdouh. His research is focused on shortcut mitigation for medical imaging foundation models for segmentation.
Ilias Stogiannidis
PhD Student
Ilias Stogiannidis
PhD Student
Ilias Stogiannidis is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris and Dr. Steven McDonagh. His research focuses on Computer Vision and general Machine Learning. For more details, visit his website.
He previously earned an MSc in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), specializing in machine learning and natural language processing. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree from the same department at AUEB.
Junyu(Jun) Yan
PhD Student
Junyu(Jun) Yan
PhD Student
Junyu Yan is a PhD student at The University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris. Her research is focused on the casual data-driven and prediction in care.
She holds a master’s degree in communications and Signal Processing from the Imperial College London. Prior to that, she received her Bachelor of Engineering degree from Xidian University in China, majoring in Telecommunication Engineering.
Before starting her PhD, she worked as an algorithm engineer at HUAWEI in Shanghai, China.
Keying Guo
PhD Student
Keying Guo
PhD Student
Keying is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris and Dr Alison Smithard, sponsored by Canon Medical. Her research is focused on causal AI for medical imaging. For more details, please visit her personal website.
Keying is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris and Dr Alison Smithard, sponsored by Canon Medical. Her research explores how ideas from causality can be built into AI to make medical imaging more reliable and trustworthy. She has a background in Physics from the University of Cambridge. For more details, please visit personal website.
Konstantinos Vilouras
PhD Student
Konstantinos Vilouras
PhD Student
Konstantinos Vilouras is a PhD student at University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris and Dr Alison O’Neil.
His research interests include learning with limited supervision, generative modelling and causality, with application to computer vision and medical imaging.
He holds a Master’s degree in Data Science and Machine Learning from National Technical University of Athens and a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
George Lansdown
PhD Student
George Lansdown
PhD Student
George Lansdown is an EngD student at the University of Edinburgh and Canon Medical Research Europe supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris, Dr Alison Smithard, and Dr Antanas Kascenas. His research is focused on interactive multimodal radiology assistance. Before starting his EngD he worked at Canon Medical Research Europe.
Madhav Agarwal
PhD Student
Madhav Agarwal
PhD Student
Madhav Agarwal is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh supervised by Dr. Steven McDonagh and Dr. Laura Sevilla. His research focuses on Multimodal Learning, Spatial-Temporal Understanding in Foundation Models, and Generative AI.
He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), where he worked on Face Reenactment and Talking Head Generation. Before starting his Ph.D., he worked as a research engineer in Germany and India, and served as a consultant and advisor for several start-ups.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Odyssefs Diamantopoulos Pantaleon
PhD Student
Odyssefs Diamantopoulos Pantaleon
PhD Student
Odyssefs Diamantopoulos Pantaleon is a PhD student at University of Edinburgh, funded by Canon Medical Research Europe, and supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris and Dr Alison O’Neil.
His research interests include using Causality, Medical Imaging, Reinforcement learning and Multimodality. For more details, visit his personal website.
He previously earned an MSc in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), specializing in machine learning and reinforcement learning. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree from the same department at AUEB.
Nikos Spyrou
PhD Student
Nikos Spyrou
PhD Student
Nikos Spyrou is a PhD student at Archimedes RU / Athena RC and at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, coadvised by Prof. Yannis Panagakis and Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris. His research interests mainly involve computer vision, representation learning, causality, generative models and applications in the medical domain.
He obtained a MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens with specialization in computer science.
Raman Dutt
PhD Student
Raman Dutt
PhD Student
Raman Dutt is a PhD student at The University of Edinburgh under the CDT Biomedical Artificial Intelligence program supervised by Professor Timothy Hospedales and Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris. His research interests include transfer learning, representation learning and self-supervised learning for medical image analysis.
He holds a master’s degree in Biomedical Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Before starting his master’s, he worked as a research assistant at Healthcare Innovations and Translational Informatics (HITI) lab at Emory University, USA. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Shiv Nadar University, India.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Robert Cronshaw
PhD Student
Robert Cronshaw
PhD Student
Robert Cronshaw is an ECAT PhD student at the University of Edinburgh supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris, Dr Steven McDonagh, and Dr Nik Hirani. He is also a radiologist and Fellow of the Royal College of Radiology. His research interests include selecting approaches with the right inductive bias for solving medical imaging problems.
Thomas Melistas
PhD Student
Thomas Melistas
PhD Student
Thomas Melistas is currently a PhD student at the Archimedes Research Unit (Athena RC) supervised by Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris, Prof. Yannis Panagakis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) and Dr. Giorgos Papanastasiou (Pfizer). His main research interests are causal machine learning and generative modeling. He is excited about the application of the above in the domains of medical imaging and computer vision.
He received an Integrated MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. His master’s thesis was on symbolic music generation. Prior to his PhD, he has worked as a Machine Learning Engineer and did research on the fields of speech emotion recognition and multimodal learning.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Yongcheng (Vincent) Yao
PhD Student
Yongcheng (Vincent) Yao
PhD Student
Yongcheng is currently a PhD student at the UKRI CDT in Biomedical AI, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh (UoE), supervised by Prof. Timothy Hospedales and Prof. Sotirios A. Tsaftari. His research mainly focuses on computer vision, vision language models, and trustworthy AI in healthcare.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Yuning Du
PhD Student
Yuning Du
PhD Student
Yuning Du is a PhD student at University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Sotirios Tsaftaris. Her research interests are focused on deep learning methods for cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) reconstruction and analysis.
She received her Master of Research degree in Medical Robotics and Image-Guided Intervention from Imperial College London. Prior to that, she received her Bachelor of Science degree from Beijing Institute of Technology in China, majoring in Opto-electronics Information Science and Engineering.
Previously, she worked as an intern for General Electric Healthcare in Beijing, China as a MR Systems Engineer.
Yuyang Xue
PhD Student
Yuyang Xue
PhD Student
Yuyang Xue is currently a PhD student in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris. His main research interests are Generative Models and Computer Vision in Deep Learning.
He received a MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Southampton. Before starting his master’s, he received his Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Fuzhou University, China.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Engineers
Danilo Bueno
Software Engineer
Danilo Bueno
Software Engineer
Danilo Bueno is a Software Engineer at the University of Edinburgh, working with Prof. Sotirios Tsaftaris within the CHAI group. He designs and maintains the data infrastructure supporting the group’s research on the Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF), and develops tools that facilitate collaboration across projects.
Previously, he contributed to the PhenomUK project, implementing software and hardware solutions for storing and sharing plant phenotyping data.
Danilo holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from São Paulo State University, Brazil, and has experience in web applications, APIs, databases, and cloud computing.
Visiting Researchers & Students
Junyi Gao
Visiting Student
Junyi Gao
Visiting Student
Junyi Gao is a PhD student in the Health Data Research UK (HDRUK) program at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Prof. Ewen Harrison. His research interests include deep-based clinical predictive modeling with electronic health record (EHR) data, population-level spatio-temporal healthcare predictions and clinical trial optimizations.
Please visit his personal website for more information.
Alumni
Alumni
- Dr Christopher Boland (PhD) - DTU Compute
- Dr Edward Moroshko (PostDoc) - Nethermind
- Ms Nefeli Gkouti (PhD) - Archimedes RU
- Dr Fasih Haider (PostDoc) - University of Edinburgh
- Dr Jingshuai Liu (PostDoc) - Chongqing University, China
- Dr Pedro Sanchez (PhD) - Sinkove
- Dr Andrew Wood (Software Engineer) - Lloyds Banking Group
- Dr Jinghan Sun (Visiting Member) - Tencent
- Dr Xiao Liu (PhD) - Huawei
- Mr Grzegorz Jacenków (PhD) - Data Scientist at Amazon
- Dr Nikolaos Dionelis (PostDoc) - Joint Research Centre, EU
- Dr John Hartley (PostDoc) - Data Scientist at Natwest Group
- Mr Victor Campello (Visiting PhD) - PhD at Universitat de Barcelona
- Dr Chen Qin (Lecturer) - Lecturer/Assistant Professor, Imperial College, London
- Dr Spyridon Thermos (PostDoc) - Startup Founder
- Dr Tian Xia (PhD) - PostDoc at The University of Edinburgh, Scotland
- Mr Andrei Dobrescu (PhD) - Computer Vision Researcher at CattleEye
- Mr Phivos Sofokleous (MSc)
- Dr Gabriele Valvano (Visiting PhD) - Lead AI Specialist, Baker Hughes, Italy
- Dr Haochuan Jiang (PostDoc) - Lecturer, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China
- Dr Agisilaos Chartsias (PhD) - Deep Learning Resarch Scientist, Ultromics, United Kingdom
- Mr Hao Chen (BEng) - PhD Student, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
- Dr Thomas Joyce (PostDoc) - PostDoc, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
- Dr Ilkay Oksuz (PhD) - Assistant Professor, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
- Dr Massimo Minervini (PhD/PostDoc) - CET Electronics, Italy
- Dr Cristian Rusu (PostDoc) - IIT
- Dr Marco Bevilacqua (PostDoc) - Data Scientist, Cdiscount, France
- Dr Anirban Mukhopadhyay (PostDoc) - Head, Medical and Environmental Computing (MEC-Lab), TU Darmstadt, Germany