Latest News
What am I doing?
My name is Christopher Yau and I am Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford and Health Data Research UK.
I am carrying out a survey of UK PhD students who are working in any area of data science and I need your help! We hope to get survey responses from over 300 PhD students so please help us by sparing 10-15 minutes of your time to answer some questions.
A report on a patient engagement workshop series on what cancer patients think about artificial intelligence is now available.
The workshop series was developed in partnership with Ovarian Cancer Action (OCA) as part of my Turing AI Fellowship.
Congratulations to PhD student Dominic Danks whose paper Derivative-Based Neural Modelling of Cumulative Distribution Functions for Survival Analysis has been accepted for presentation at AISTATS 2022.
Christopher Yau will be relocating to the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford in February 2022 to take up a position as Senior Research Fellow between the Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health and the Nuffield Department of Population Health. Future recruitment to the group for postdocs and students will be via the University of Oxford.
Our latest paper, based on the thesis work of former DPhil student Zhiyuan, has been published in Genome Biology. CIDER: an interpretable meta-clustering framework for single-cell RNA-seq data integration and evaluation describes a meta-clustering workflow based on inter-group similarity measures. We demonstrate that CIDER outperforms other scRNA-Seq clustering methods and integration approaches in both simulated and real datasets. Moreover, we show that CIDER can be used to assess the biological correctness of integration in real datasets, while it does not require the existence of prior cellular annotations.
Kaspar Martens will present his latest work at the NeurIPS Workshop “Learning Meaningful Representations of Life” Rarity: Discovering rare cell populations from single-cell imaging data. The work arises from his Turing-Crick Biomedical Award which supports a collaboration between the Alan Turing Institute and the Ciccarelli Group at Kings College London and the Francis Crick Institute.
Christopher Yau has supported Health Data Research UK (HDRUK) PhD students Fabian Falck and Haoting Zhang in the development of work that has now been published as a paper at the NeurIPS 2021 conference. The work entitled Multi-Facet Clustering Variational Autoencoders is a novel class of variational autoencoders with a hierarchy of latent variables, each with a Mixture-of-Gaussians prior, that learns multiple clusterings simultaneously, and is trained fully unsupervised and end-to-end. Chris, who directs the HDRUK PhD programme, writes about the work of the students in this blog.
The Columbia Hospital For Women Research Foundation have awarded Christopher Yau the prize for most impactful paper in 2020 in the field of obstetrical and gynecologic and breast disease. The prize consisted of a $5,000 to a charity of Chris and Ahmed’s choosing and they selected Ovarian Cancer Action who co-funded the original work.
Recently Christopher Yau worked with Ovarian Cancer Action UK to put together a webinar on his research for patients and the public. You can find the video on Youtube: “What is artificial intelligence and what does it mean for cancer research?”.