External Activities

Arpita Saggar delivered a Keynote at the Maudsley Learning Simulation Conference 2025 titled: “Artificial Intelligence-Driven Avatars for Experiential Medical Education.
Ben Keel, Presenting at MedInfo in Taiwan — a moment captured by Simon Poon, sent to Owen Johnson whilst in China, and now shared from the UK. A global journey in one photo! "We came to support Ben, and take a picture as evidence to show he is working hard!"
Omar Choudhry, (Cohort 5 CDT student) has been made an associate fellow of Advance HE via the Professional Recognition in Student Education (PRiSE) scheme. Information about PRiSE and how PhD students can apply is available here. Many congratulations on your success, Omar.
Congratulations to Andrew Broad (from Cohort 1 CDT students) whose PhD thesis has received research excellence recognition from the University of Leeds. Congratulations and very well done, Andrew! Very best wishes for a rewarding career ahead. Congratulations go also to the exceptional supervisory team – Marc de Kamps (School of Computer Science), Alex Wright (Leeds Teaching Hospitals) and Darren Treanor (Leeds Teaching Hospitals). Recognition of excellence at the University of Leeds recognises exceptional PhD research: "Research excellence reflects outstanding achievement in the thesis and oral examination at a level significantly above what would be expected for the award of a doctoral degree (highly original, high level of critical thought, outstanding presentation of the work), where the candidate has fulfilled all requirements for the degree either without corrections (straight pass) or with minor editorial corrections. Evidence might also be identified from associated research outputs which might include: major theoretical contribution; acceptance for publication of sections in major journals; patents; prizes for completed work; marketable software; original equipment; new therapies; major exhibitions or performances arising from the practical part of a practice-based degree."
MICCAI 2024 saw enthusiastic participation from our CDT students, who not only presented their research but also networked with international students and industry partners. Their involvement underscores the program’s commitment to advancing AI in healthcare and dedication to addressing worldwide healthcare challenges through collaborative efforts.
CDT students had the incredible opportunity to attend and present posters at the N8 Digital Health Community Day held at the University of Leeds, Nexus. This event was a gathering of experts from various fields, providing a platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration in the realm of digital health. Read more at our CDT students' blog.
Emma Briggs completed a short clinical observation at Oaklands Health Centre general practice, gaining first-hand experience of clinician interaction with primary care digital systems and diagnostic processes.
Jack Breen won the Best Poster Award at the Health Data Hub AI4Health 2023 Summer School and he have also previously won the Best Presentation Award at the School of Computing Symposium 2023.
Mary Paterson presented a poster about the classification of vocal pathologies at UK Speech. This was a fantastic opportunity to meet with other researcher using speech technologies and learn from some of the top experts in this field.
Three of our CDT PhD students (Jason Keighley, Rachel Harkness and Jack Breen) had their first experience discussing their research at SPIE Medical Imaging 2023 in San Diego. This included presentations about efficiency in ovarian cancer classification using histopathology data, explainability in the classification of chest x-rays, and a poster about the effective compression of histopathology data.
Mary Paterson and Bailey Andrew attended the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023) in New Orleans. Mary presented a poster in the Women in Machine Learning workshop summarising her work using AI to detect voice disease from speech. Bailey presented a preprint of his work at the New Frontiers in Graph Learning workshop. This conference was an amazing opportunity to meet a wide range of researchers and see the newest cutting edge work being done in computer science.
Anna-Grace Linton presented her research at the UK Health Text analytics conference (HealTAC 2021).
Three CDT students - Jack Breen, Rachel Harkness and Joe Sims - attended the leading international conference in medical image analysis (MICCAI 2021). Jack Breen presented his research to one of the workshop challenges.
Rachael Harkness presented her research at the International .Medical Informatics Association conference (MedInfo21).
Andrew Broad presented his work to the monthly meetings of the National Pathology Imaging Cooperative's Digital Research Group at St James's Hospital.
Sara Jones was awarded the Margaret Steel Innovation Award (£1000) from the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Leeds.
Our students attend various seminars at the University of Leeds, e.g. the Leeds Institute of Data Analytics seminar series, the School of Computing colloquia, the National Pathology Imaging Cooperative seminars, the Computer Vision and AI for Languages special interest groups.

The first cohort of our CDT students met The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Baroness Nicky Morgan who visited the University on Leeds on 24 January 2020, discussing how researchers are being trained to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in the fight against cancer.