Dr Asra Aslam

B.Tech & M.Tech (India), PhD (Ireland), Postdoc (University of Leeds)

Information School

Lecturer in Data Science

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a.aslam@sheffield.ac.uk
The Wave

Full contact details

Dr Asra Aslam
Information School
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
Profile

I am currently a Lecturer in Data Science, I joined University of Sheffield in January 2025

  • I worked as Research Fellow (AI & Health Data Sciences) and ML Lead on NIHR DynAIRx project at University of Leeds UoL, UK (March 2023 to Jan 2025). Here, I was co-Supervisor of 2 Phd students, 3 masters students (completed dissertation) and taught models for "AI and ML" and "Statistics/Modelling" in Health Sciences.

  • In parallel to my work at UoL, I was also employed by Alan Turing Institute (London, UK) at the position of  "Principal Investigator (PI)" in collaboration with Industry "Transport for London TfL" from June 2024 to Jan 2025. 

  • In addition to that, I worked as an "Honorary Visiting Researcher" at Newcastle University from Jan 2024 to Jan 2025. 

  • I am also General Chair of Women in Computer Vision WiCV (>3000 members) @IEEE/CVF CVPR for 2 years (Nov 2022 to Dec 2024). 

  • Prior to Academics, I worked in Industry as a Machine Learning Research Scientist (mindtrace.ai) at Manchester, UK for 2 years (March 2021 to March 2023).

  • Previously in 2016, I also worked as Lecturer in Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering In AMU, India and taught multiple courses of Computer Science to undergraduate and masters students.

Multi-International Awards Winner:

Winner of prestigious 'Rising Star of the Year' Award winner at the Computing.co.uk 'Women in Tech Excellence Awards 2024’ (among 6000 candidates), held on November 27th, 2024 at Hilton Park Lane, London, UK. Sponsored by HSBC, Lenovo, Capgemini

Winner of prestigious “Education/Academic Leader of the Year 2024 Award” WeAreNovi, Forward Ladies, Sponsored by The Open University, BASF, GKN Aerospace. Held on 22nd Nov, 2024, London, UK.

Highly Commended Winner for “Hildegard Franke Early Career Award” part of the 43rd Annual Conference PHCSG AGM 2024 | BCS. This is for my work on the NIHR DynAIRx project. Held on 14th Nov, 2024, Shipley, UK

Highly Commended Winner for “Women of the Future Award” in Science, Awards launched 17 years ago, Sponsored by Aviva, iQE.. at London Hilton Bankside, UK, Nov 2023

Qualifications

  • PhD (March 2021) in Computer Vision and Deep Neural Networks for Smart Cities from The Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University of Galway, Ireland

  • Masters (2015) and Bachelors (2013) in Computer Science and Engineering from AMU, India.

Research interests

  • As Research Fellow on NIHR Project (Collaboration of University of Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Alan Turing Institute), I led the team of postdoctoral researchers for the development of exhaustive Codelists (>220 conditions) in the UK, and got nominated by my project for the Hildegard Early Career Award in Primary Care for this work at the prestigious 43rd BCS Conference. In this project, I also led the development of designing Machine Learning models (Temporal Graph neural Network) for CPRD (60 million patient dataset of UK).  

  • As a Principal Investigator, I led the team of 8 Postdoctoral Researchers, PhD students, and Early Career Researchers belonging to different universities and industries (University of Cambridge,Google, University of Southampton, University of Bristol, Alan Turing Institute etc.) within the UK. Here worked on data of London Underground Railways, covering 70% data of the whole geographical area using 3D Point Cloud, and Image Segmentation using U-Net and SAM models.

  • My PhD is in Data Science and AI with focus on Object Detection, Transfer Learning, Machine Learning, and Event Processing. In Industry, I worked on multiple AI projects associated with Computer Vision for  asset inspection, 3-D point cloud, segmentation, detection, classification etc. Other than these I led the projects of Medical Imaging (Came in top-3 for a MICCAI Challenge) and Transport for London (TfL) for Smart Cities use cases.

Research group

I am a member of Insigneo Institute, and Health Informatics Research Group.

Grants

Role: Co-PI, Grant worth £100,000, Duration 1.5 years, NIHR Team Science Funding Grant on Medical Equity project, in collaboration with Imperial College, King's College, University of Glasgow, and University of Warwick, UK

Role: Co-Applicant, UKRI CDT (Centres for Doctoral Training, Duration 3 years) Grant, Worth ~£100,000 for PhD Student in Collaboration with University of Leeds (Dr Samuel Relton, & Prof Philip Conaghan), March 2024 to Ongoing

Role: Co-PI, Grant with £10,000, June 2024, in COllaboration with University of Liverpool, and Alan Turing Institute

Role: Main Applicant, 10+ fully-funded Travel Grants, worth £3000 each from IEEE, NIHR, & Computer Vision Foundation (CVF),  for Conferences CVPR (3 times), ICML, ECCV, AISTATS, AI-UK (for Travelling, Accommodation, Registration & Other expenses) 2019-2024

Role: PI, NVIDIA GPU grant in PhD, worth £6000.

Teaching interests

Computer Vision, Health Sciences, AI (Deep Neural Networks), Medical Imaging, Electronic Health Records, Information Retrieval, Smart Cities (IoT & IoMT)

Teaching activities

I will be teaching Business Intelligence and a Data Science modules 

Professional activities and memberships

  • Co-PI on NIHR Team Science Funding Grant on Medical Equity project, worth 100K, in collaboration with Imperial College, King's College, University of Glasgow, and University of Warwick, UK

  • “Principal Investigator” at Alan Turing Institute in collaboration with Industry “Transport for London TfL”

  • Invited Speaker (upcoming) at REWIRED Conference 2025 (One of the UK’s biggest and #1 best digital health conferences)

  • On the Editorial Board, Area Chair, Program Committee, and Organiser of workshops, contributing to multiple top-tier journals and leading international conferences in AI, Computer Vision, and Health Sciences. Google Scholar Profile Publications (>1400 citations) 

  • Accepted by Horizons Institute Global Academy Crucible Programme

  • General Chair for WiCV workshop at prestigious IEEE/CVF CVPR 2024 at Seattle, US, June 2024

  • Board Member at Women in Computer Vision (WiCV) > 3000 members

  • Academic AI UK Lead (Sponsorship Chair) at WOmen in AI (WAI) >10000 members

  • Invited Panel member at TU Delft, DynAIRx Representative at AI-UK, Speaker at AIM-RSF (£23 million NIHR investment), and Speaker at University of Liverpool

  • Organised more than 8 workshops/events at University of Edinburgh, Alan Turing Institute, University of Leeds, University of Liverpool etc.