Professor Ana Basiri
- Professor of Geospatial Data Science (School of Geographical & Earth Sciences)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2399-1797Research interests
Professor Ana Basiri works on developing (theoretical and applied) solutions to the challenges of 'new forms of data' such as missingness and biases. These solutions are based on the mindset that considers the bias, missingness, or low quality as a useful source of data to make inference about the underlying reasons for the missingness and bias. One application of this is extracting the 3D map of cities using the patterns of blockage, reflection, and attenuation of the GPS signals (or other similar signals), that are contributed by the volunteers/crowd.
In the era of big data, open data, social media, and crowdsourced data when “we are drowning in data”, gaps and unavailability, representativeness, and bias issues associated with them may indicate some hidden problems or reasons of biases and missingness. These novel solutions allow us to understand the data, society, and cities better.
For this, she leads a team of an interdisciplinary team and collaborates with world-leading academic and industrial partners, including Ordnance Survey GB, Uber, Alan Turing Institute, and engage with the public, policymakers, and government.
Ana is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Chair of Geospatial Data Science at the University of Glasgow, the Editor in Chief of Journal of Navigation and Associate/Guest Editor of several high impact journals including IET Smart city and International Journal Geographical Information Science. She has received several awards and prizes, including Women Role Model in Science by Alexander Humboldt and European Commission Marie Curie Alumni.
Before joining the University of Glasgow, she was a lecturer at University College London, a European Research Council Fellow at the University of Southampton, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and a Postdoc Research Fellow at the Maynooth University of Ireland.
Grants
Active Projects:
UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (£1,184,608) (PI)- Indicative Data Science: 3D Model of cities using GNSS degradation May 2019- April 2023 (4+3 years)
Royal Society Research Grant (PI)- Crowdsourced GNSS Data for Indoor Positioning (£5,760), March 2018 – 2020
UCL Grand Challenges (CoI) GBStressFree: Green-Blue Spaces for Stress-Free Travel (£9,500), Jan 2020 – July 2020
EPSRC Transport and Ageing: An Examination into Digitally Enabled Flexible Public Transport Services and the Opportunities and Barriers for Older Citizens (supervisor) (2017-2023)
Past Projects:
Alzheimer's Society UK: (Co-I) Scaling the Peaks; Understanding the barriers and drivers to providing and using dementia-friendly community services in rural areas: the impact of location, cultures and community in the Peak District National Park on sustaining service innovations (£279,112), July 2015- June 2019, Ref; AS-SF-14-005
UCL Seedcorn Small Grant Scheme: Mapping The Implications Of Ai In Educational Development Discourses: Public-Private Partnerships -Biases in AI for education in Global South-east Education (Co-I), UCL Institute of Education Jan 2019 – July 2019 (£3000)
UCL Grand Challenges Dynamics of Globalisation: The Future Of Residential Interrelationship In The UK: The Case Study Of The Israeli And The Iranian Communities (PI), Jan 2019 – July 2019 (£2,500)
Equality, Diversity, Inclusion Initiatives: Career Development for Academic with Caring Responsibilities, Dec 2017 – July 2018, UCL and Marie Curie Alumni, (£660)
EPSRC ICASE awarded studentship with OS: Improving Quality of OS Transport Data Using Spatio-temporal Patterns of Movements, Sept 2017- Sept 2021, (£89,765)
Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Discovery of Geospatial Big Data- Primary Application Domain: URBAN – urban science, transportation, logistics: (PI) Microsoft Azure Data Science Research, May 2016-May 2017 (USD $20,000)
The Use of Spatial uncertainty for the Purpose of Privacy Protection: (PI) Modelling Uncertain Word Research Priority Area (RPA) The University of Nottingham, May 2016- July 2017 (£6,300).
EPSRC Data Driven Discovery Research Priority Area project: The Challenges and Solutions to the Management and Analysis of Geospatial Big Data, Sept 2015- March 2016, (£2,700).
Cluster2020 project: Big Data Cluster research Project (Co-Investigator), The University of Nottingham Internal funding program, October 2014- March 2016, (£5,900).
UK Space Agency- Space for All: Community Award Scheme (Co-Investigator) Revealing the Martian Landscapes through Linked Physical and Virtual Models (£6,000).
Faculty for the Future Grants (Principle Investigator), Schlumberger Foundation, Trajectory mining to extract travel behaviour patterns, [November 2014], (Fellowship not taken up to be able to accept EU Marie Curie Fellowship), (US$ 40,000)
Advance Award–Women in Science Fellowship (Principle-Investigator), Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) (Navigational Suggestion Inference Using Crowd-Sourced Tracking Data Analysis, [August 2013] (Fellowship not taken up to be able to accept EU Marie Curie Fellowship), €117,803.
Supervision
Current PhD students:
Paul Mullins (EPSRC studentship)- Primary Supervisor
Melda Salhab (UCL Overseas Research Scholarship)- Primary Supervisor
Dining Liu (self-funded)- Primary Supervisor
Jingjing Yan (2019)- Co-supervisor Ningbo Campus, The University of Nottingham - Viva passed with minor correction on 4th Dec 2019.
- Polat Kayali, Merve
Visualisation of Missing Geospatial Data using Augmented Reality - Sutton, Dominick
Using Spatial Data to Understand Missing Data Mechanisms - WANG, Yu
Multi sensor positioning for urban canyon navigation - Yuan, Xinyi
Urban Renewal Potential: Multi-criteria Evaluation Model Supported by Digital Twin System
Professional activities & recognition
Research fellowships
- 2019 - 2023: UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship
- 2019: Royal Institute of Navigation
- 2020 - 2022: ERC Starting Grant
- 2013 - 2015: Marie Curie Fellowship
Grant committees & research advisory boards
- 2019 - 2023: UKRI-EPSRC, Future Leaders Fellowship
- 2018 - 2020: Royal Society, Research Grant
- 2021 - 2021: EPSRC, ICT SAT
Editorial boards
- 2019 - Now: Editor in Chief of Journal of Navigation
- 2019 - Now: Associate Editor of IET Smart Cities
Supplementary
- Professor Ana Basiri holds a chair position in Geospatial Data Science and is a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow. Ana works on developing solutions that consider missingness, unavailability, and biases in data as a useful source of data to make inference about the underlying reasons that caused missingness or biases. This is particularly a challenge for 'new forms of data' such as social media, crowdsourced and self-reporting data. A good example of this includes extracting the 3D map of cities using the patterns of blockage, reflection, and attenuation of the GPS signals (or other similar signals), that are contributed by the volunteers/crowd. In the era of big data, open data, social media and crowdsourced data when “we are drowning in data”, gaps and unavailability, representativeness and bias issues associated with them may indicate some hidden problems or reasons allowing us to understand the data, society and cities better. Ana leads a team of an interdisciplinary team and collaborates with world-leading academic and industrial partners, including Ordnance Survey GB, Uber, Alan Turing Institute, and engage with the public, policymakers and government. Ana is the Editor in Chief of Journal of Navigation and Associate/Guest Editor of several high impact journals including IET Smart city and International Journal Geographical Information Science. She has received several awards and prizes, including Women Role Model in Science by Alexander Humboldt and European Commission Marie Curie Alumni. She joined the University of Glasgow on 1st June 2020, before this I was a lecturer at University College London (UCL) Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), a European Research Council fellow at the University of Southampton, a Marie Curie Fellow at The University of Nottingham, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Maynooth University, Ireland.
Additional information
Please contact me via ana.basiri@glasgow.ac.uk, or a.basiri@ucl.ac.uk, or abasiri@turing.ac.uk or a direct message on twitter for any collaboration, discussing ideas, postdoc, and studentship opportunities. I will never say no to a chat over a coffee!
