Irena Spasic's Homepage

Funded projects

Welsh Government (2020-2021) Cross-lingual word embeddings (CI). Grant total: £90K.
Health and Care Research Wales (2020-2025) PRIME Centre Wales (Wales centre for primary and emergency care research) (CI). Grant total: £4.6M.
Welsh Government (2019-2020) Welsh word embeddings (PI). Grant total: £90K.
Wellcome Trust (2019) Modelling burns first-aid conversations on social media to shape a vital intervention (CI). Grant total: £44K.
Intellectual Property Office (2019-2020) AI-assisted patent prior art searching (CI). Grant total: £80K.
Welsh Government (2019) Welsh stemmer (PI). Grant total: £20K.
HealTex (2018) Automated prioritisation and categorisation of safety and pharmacovigilance events (PI). Grant total: £30K.
Global Challenges Research Fund (2018) Computational analysis of the measles outbreak in Serbia (PI). Grant total: £15K.
Data Innovation Research Institute (2018) Scaling up FlexiTerm in a quest to mine big text data (PI). Grant total: £5K.
European Commission (2018-2021) Innovation and consolidation for large-scale digitisation of natural heritage (CI). Grant total: €3M.
Health and Care Research Wales (2018-2020) Wales centre for primary and emergency (including unscheduled) care research (PRIME) (CI). Grant total: £1.8M.
Multiple Sclerosis Society (2018-2020) Life-style, exercise and activity package for people living with progressive multiple sclerosis (CI). Grant total: £300K.
Welsh Government (2018) Welsh WordNet (PI). Grant total: £20K.
Health Foundation (2017-2018) Regional spread and dissemination of TRAK eHealth intervention for musculoskeletal conditions in primary care (co-PI). Grant total: £30K.
EPSRC (2016-2019) HealTex: UK Healthcare Text Analytics Research Network , EP/N027280/1 (CI). Grant total: £340K.
Wellcome Trust (2016) Using qualitative analysis of patient blogs to inform development of automated measurement of self-care with text mining and sentiment analysis (co-PI). Grant total: £22.3K.
ESRC/AHRC (2016-2019) Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - CorCenCC (National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh): a community-driven approach to linguistic corpus construction (CI). Grant total: £1.8M.
NISCHR (2015-2017) Improving access to care and treatment for patients with hip and knee pain at the primary/secondary care interface (co-PI). Grant total: £235K.
ESRC (2015) Improving the consequence management of security events: A simulation exercise for policy and practice development (CI). Grant total: £14K.
Health Foundation (2015-2016) Implementation of TRAK to develop eRehab for knee conditions: A web-based application suite to support self-management in rehabilitation (co-PI). Grant total: £70K.
Nesta (2014) Data-driven methods for 'below the radar activity' in the 'social economy' (CI). Grant total: £10K.
ESRC (2013-2014) After Woolwich: Social reactions on social media , ES/L008181/1 (CI). Grant total: £130K.
Cardiff and Vale UHB - Urology (2013) Secure web-based platform for patient data collection (CI). Grant total: £5.5K.
Cardiff and Vale UHB - Orthopaedic Department (2013) Implementation of an activity diary as a mobile application in support of knee rehabilitation (CI). Grant total: £5K.
Cardiff University School of Medicine Postgraduate Research Studentship Competition (2012-2015) Biological pathways in psychiatric disorders - identifying disease-relevant interactions (supervisor). Grant total: £27.7K.
European Commission (2012-2015) Tackling radicalisation in dispersed society , HOME/ISEC/2011/AG/RAD-4000002146 (CI). Grant total: €414K.
EPSRC (2012-2013) Innovative informatics for neighbourhood intelligence (CI). Grant total: £36.8K.
Arthritis Research UK Biomechanics and Bioengineering Centre (2012) Development of iKnee: A web-based health informatics application for a self-care rehabilitation intervention (CI). Grant total: £1.8K.
NIHR Public Health Research programme (2012-2014) Randomised controlled trial of all-Wales licensed premises intervention to reduce alcohol-related violence , 10/3010/21 (CI). Grant total: £650K.
British Heart Foundation (2012-2015) Identification and analysis of genomic programme for cardiac specification (collaborator). Grant total: £201K.
MRC Doctoral Training Grant (2011-2014) Finding an optimal CHD risk calculator with genetic programming (supervisor). Grant total: £26K.
Cardiff University President's Research Scholarship (2010-2013) Text and data mining of electronic healthcare documents (supervisor). Grant total: £25K.
EU Network of Excellence Semantic Interoperability and Data Mining in Biomedicine - Network Visit Grants Funding (2006) - Approximately €1500 awarded to visit EMBL-EBI and collaborate with Dr Susanna-Assunta Sansone and Dr Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann on applications of text mining in metabolomics.
Daiwa Adrian prize (2004) - A triennial award for excellence in scientific collaboration between the UK and Japan.

Other achievements

Rising Star award (2013) - Shortlisted in recognition of an outstanding commitment and contribution going above and beyond the call of duty.
Third i2b2 Shared-Task and Workshop Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data: Medication Extraction Challenge (2009) The leader of a top ranked team (ranked 3rd with the same significance level as the 2nd ranked team).
Second i2b2 Shared-Task and Workshop Challenges in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data: Obesity Challenge (2008) A member of a top ranked team (ranked 1st and 7th for the extraction of textual and intuitive disease status respectively).
ORS award (2002) - Overseas Research Students award scheme was set up by the Secretary of State for Education and Science to attract high-quality international students to the UK to undertake research. It is given to outstanding overseas students on the basis of academic merit only.