Me

Victoria Smith

Researcher in Biomedical NLP

London, UK

v.smith.20@ucl.ac.uk

LinkedIn | CV | GitHub


Bio

Hello and welcome to my website! Thank you for visiting! I am a second year PhD student in Biomedical NLP on the CDT for AI Enabled Healthcare Systems at UCL. My current research is focused on extracting Pharmacokinetic Data from tables and free text in Scientific Literature and using this extracted data to predict Pharmacokinetic Parameters. This project is developing skill set in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning.

I am passionate about health and how machine learning and data science can be exploited to improve health outcomes. I am also passionate about deploying machine learning safely and ethically. My career aspiration is to make an impact in health by building robust computational models which allow better decisions to be made, across drug development, clinical trials and in the clinic, to benefit both patients and health professionals.

About Me!

In my spare time I enjoy getting active, especially in the great outdoors (you may find me cycling, bouldering, running, hiking, kickboxing or yoga-ing!), I'm a foody (you may find me trying new cuisines, cooking up a storm for friends and family, or making artisan chocolates), I love to travel (find me bicycle touring across europe) and I enjoy relaxing with a good book (as said by C.S. Lewis - “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”)!

Books I Like

Non-Fiction
  • Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cath O'Neil
  • Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a world designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez
  • The Diet Myth: The Real Science behind what we Eat, by Tim Spector
  • She Has Her Mothers Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, by Carl Zimmer
  • Breathe: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor
Fiction
  • Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus
  • The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
  • Captain Corelli's Mandolin, by Louis De Bernieres
  • The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
  • Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead


Education

UCL UKRI CDT in AI-Enabled Healthcare Systems, Institute of Health Informatics
2021 - Current

PhD Candidate, NLP for Information Extraction in Pharmacokinetics

Supervisors: Joe Standing, Frank Kloprogge, Waty Lilaonitkul


Birkbeck University of London
2021 - 2022

PGCert, Statistics for Data Science, Merit


UCL UKRI MRes in AI-Enabled Healthcare Systems, Institute of Health Informatics
2020 - 2021

MRes, AI Enabled Healthcare Systems, First Class

Supervisors: Joe Standing, Frank Kloprogge, Waty Lilaonitkul


UCL Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology
2014 - 2018

MSci, Neuroscience, First Class

Supervisors: Francis Edwards, Dervis Salih

Research Experience

NHS Data Science Intern
June 2023 - November 2023

About the Internship Scheme | About the Project

Project on Investigating Privacy Concerns and Mitigations in Clinical Language Models. Project Outputs coming soon.

Mentors: Dan Schofield, Jonny Pearson


Enrichment Student at the Alan Turing Institute
Sept 2022 - Sept 2023

About the Scheme

Worked on a survey regarding Identifying and Mitigating Privacy Risks Stemming from Language Models Privacy with the Safe and Ethical AI Team. Please see our Preprint.

Mentors: Ali Shahin Shamsabadi

Collaborators: Adrian Weller, Carolyn Ashurst


Teaching & Supervision Experience

PGTA for MSc Digital Health and Entrepreneurship at the UCL Global Business School for Health
September 2023 - February 2023

Lead TA on the Digital Health and AI Technology course: Co-designing the module content, teaching/lecturing, developing the marking key and leading on marking coordination between TAs, supervising students to develop healthcare chatbots and full business cases.

Module Lead: Waty Lilaonitkul


Supervisor for iBSc in Mathematics, Computers and Medicine Research Project
November 2023 - May 2023

Project on Pharmacokinetic Document Classification. Supported on dataset curation and NLP Classification Pipeline development.

Co-supervisors: Zhonghui Huang (UCL)


Supervisor for UCL MSc Pharmaceutics Research Project
May 2022 - August 2022

Project on Pharmacokinetic Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction. Supported on the technical pipeline development.

Co-supervisors: Venkatesh Pilla Reddy (AstraZeneca), Joe Standing (UCL)


Publications & Posters

Presentations

  • London Pharmacokinetics Interest Group (LPIG), Regular Speaker, 2021-Current
  • GOSH DRE Data & Analytics Seminar Series, Regular Invited Speaker, 2021-Current
  • AstraZeneca AI Natural Language Processing CoP event, Invited Speaker, 20/04/2023
  • CAI4H Conference, Invited Speaker, 04/05/2023
  • NICE Pathways Coordination Forum - AI & Digital Regulations Service, Invited Speaker, 17/11/2023
  • Institute of Health Informatics Seminar, Invited Speaker, 21/02/2024