I recently passed my PhD defense at the University of Cambridge, where I was supervised by Prof. Cecilia Mascolo. I am now a research intern at Microsoft Research working on machine learning for health.
My research as a whole enables AI models to learn richer semantics of high-dimensional real-world data (time-series, mobile sensors, audio, or other modalities). To this end, I work on data-efficient models that learn meaningful representations and I am particularly interested in the following paradigms:
- Self-supervision. Contrastive or generative? What comes after data augmentations?
- Transfer learning. How can models generalize out of distribution? What are their limits?
- Multi-tasking. Which tasks can be used as auxiliary targets and why?
Human-centered AI encodes many complexities of the real world and hence I try to find better ways to model data missingness, irregular sampling, noise, multi-modality, and long-tails. Beyond theory, I collaborate closely with world-class health experts to apply robust concepts from data science and accelerate scientific discovery.
During my studies, I was fortunate to work in diverse industries including multinational telcos (Telefonica Research), internet startups (Qustodio), retail tech (Ocado), and research labs. Further, I am a core member of an audio-AI study (covid-19-sounds.org) which builds predictive models for COVID-19 using smartphone respiratory recordings and has been featured in international media such as the BBC, Forbes, and the Financial Times (see more below).
nov 2021 • Our paper "Sounds of COVID-19: exploring realistic performance of audio-based digital testing" has been accepted to Nature Digital Medicine! A short paper "Evaluating Contrastive Learning on Wearable Timeseries for Downstream Clinical Outcomes" is accepted to ML4H 2021, while our perspective "Breaking away from labels: the promise of self-supervised machine learning in intelligent health" will appear in Cell Patterns.
oct 2021 • Our paper "COVID-19 Sounds: A Large-Scale Audio Dataset for Digital Respiratory Screening" has been accepted to NeurIPS 2021 (benchmark track)! Along with the paper, we release one of the largest real-world datasets for audio-based machine learning for health.
sep 2021 • After a valuable discussion with my examiners Mateja Jamnik and David Clifton, I passed my PhD viva! I am beyond grateful to my supervisor Cecilia Mascolo for the unceasing support throughout the degree. I now joined Microsoft Research hosted by Stephanie Hyland.
aug 2021 • I chaired the timeseries session at KDD 2021 with an awesome set of papers and participants.
jul 2021 • I submitted my PhD thesis with the title "Machine learning to model health with multimodal mobile sensor data". Thanks to everyone who made this possible!
may 2021 • Our paper "Anticipatory Detection of Compulsive Body-focused Repetitive Behaviors with Wearables", in collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs, has been accepted to MobileHCI 2021!
mar 2021 • In collaboration with Stefanos Laskaridis and Mario Almeida at Samsung AI, we organise a tutorial on federated learning for activity recognition at MobiCom 2021.
feb 2021 • Our paper "Self-supervised transfer learning of physiological representations from free-living wearable data" has been accepted to CHIL 2021! A new paper out of our COVID project, "Exploring automatic COVID-19 diagnosis via voice and symptoms from crowdsourced data", is accepted to ICASSP 2021. To give back to the community, we offer our data to the Computational Paralinguistics Challenge at Interspeech 2021.
jan 2021 • Our paper "SelfHAR: Improving Human Activity Recognition through Self-training with Unlabeled Data" has been accepted to IMWUT/Ubicomp, while our opinion piece with Oxford/Turing "Digital Phenotyping and Sensitive Health Data: Implications for Data Governance" appeared in JAMIA.
📖 Publications
2021
COVID-19 Sounds: A Large-Scale Audio Dataset for Digital Respiratory Screening
Tong Xia*, Dimitris Spathis*, Chloe Brown, Jagmohan Chauhan, Andreas Grammenos, Jing Han, Apinan Hasthanasombat, Erika Bondareva, Ting Dang, Andres Floto, Pietro Cicuta, Cecilia Mascolo (*equal contribution)
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks Track, to appear
Sounds of COVID-19: exploring realistic performance of audio-based digital testing
Jing Han*, Tong Xia*, Dimitris Spathis, Erika Bondareva, Chloë Brown, Jagmohan Chauhan, Ting Dang, Andreas Grammenos, Apinan Hasthanasombat, Andres Floto, Pietro Cicuta, Cecilia Mascolo
Nature Digital Medicine, to appear
Self-supervised transfer learning of physiological representations from free-living wearable data
Dimitris Spathis, Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo, Soren Brage, Nicholas Wareham, Cecilia Mascolo
ACM Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL), Virtual Event, USA
Exploring Automatic COVID-19 Diagnosis via voice and symptoms from Crowdsourced Data
Jing Han, Chloë Brown*, Jagmohan Chauhan*, Andreas Grammenos*, Apinan Hasthanasombat*, Dimitris Spathis*, Tong Xia*, Pietro Cicuta, Cecilia Mascolo
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing
(ICASSP), Toronto, Canada
SelfHAR: Improving Human Activity Recognition through Self-training with Unlabeled Data
Chi Ian Tang, Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo*, Dimitris Spathis*, Soren Brage, Nicholas Wareham, Cecilia Mascolo
Proc. on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/Ubicomp), 5(1)
The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: COVID-19 Cough, COVID-19 Speech, Escalation & Primates
Björn W. Schuller, Anton Batliner, Christian Bergler, Cecilia Mascolo, Jing Han, Iulia Lefter, Heysem Kaya, Shahin Amiriparian, Alice Baird, Lukas Stappen, Sandra Ottl, Maurice Gerczuk, Panagiotis Tzirakis, Chloë Brown, Jagmohan Chauhan, Andreas Grammenos, Apinan Hasthanasombat, Dimitris Spathis, Tong Xia, Pietro Cicuta, Leon J. M. Rothkrantz, Joeri Zwerts, Jelle Treep, Casper Kaandorp
Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), Brno, Czechia
Digital Phenotyping and Sensitive Health Data: Implications for Data Governance
Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo, Dimitris Spathis, Jordan Gifford-Moore, Jessica Morley, Josh Cowls
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 28(9): 2002–2008
Anticipatory Detection of Compulsive Body-focused Repetitive Behaviors with Wearables
Benjamin Searle, Dimitris Spathis, Marios Constantinides, Daniele Quercia, Cecilia Mascolo
ACM International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI), Toulouse, France
Evaluating Contrastive Learning on Wearable Timeseries for Downstream Clinical Outcomes
Kevalee Shah, Dimitris Spathis, Chi Ian Tang, Cecilia Mascolo
Machine Learning for Health (ML4H), to appear
Breaking away from labels: the promise of self-supervised machine learning in intelligent health
Dimitris Spathis, Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo, Laia Marques-Fernandez, Cecilia Mascolo
Cell Patterns, to appear
Wearables, smartphones and artificial intelligence for digital phenotyping and health
Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo, Dimitris Spathis, Emma Clifton, Cecilia Mascolo
Digital Health, Chapter 3
Universals and variations in musical preferences: A study of preferential reactions to Western music in 350,000 people across 53 countries
David M. Greenberg, Sebastian Wride, Daniel Snowden, Dimitris Spathis, Jeff Potter, Jason Rentfrow
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, to appear
2020
Exploring Automatic Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Crowdsourced Respiratory Sound Data
Chloë Brown*, Jagmohan Chauhan*, Andreas Grammenos*, Jing Han*, Apinan Hasthanasombat*, Dimitris Spathis*, Tong Xia*, Pietro Cicuta, Cecilia Mascolo
International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD), San Diego, USA
Learning Generalizable Physiological Representations from Large-scale Wearable Data
Dimitris Spathis, Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo, Soren Brage, Nicholas Wareham, Cecilia Mascolo
NeurIPS Machine Learning for Mobile Health workshop (ML4MH @ NeurIPS), Vancouver, Canada
Exploring Contrastive Learning in Human Activity Recognition for Healthcare
Chi Ian Tang, Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo, Dimitris Spathis, Cecilia Mascolo
NeurIPS Machine Learning for Mobile Health workshop (ML4MH @ NeurIPS), Vancouver, Canada
2019
Sequence Multi-task Learning to Forecast Mental Wellbeing from Sparse Self-reported Data
Dimitris Spathis, Sandra Servia, Katayoun Farrahi, Cecilia Mascolo, Jason Rentfrow
International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD), Anchorage, USA
Passive mobile sensing and psychological traits for large scale mood prediction
Dimitris Spathis, Sandra Servia, Katayoun Farrahi, Cecilia Mascolo, Jason Rentfrow
International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth), Trento, Italy
Interactive dimensionality reduction
using similarity projections
Dimitris Spathis, Nikolaos Passalis, Anastasios Tefas
Knowledge-Based Systems, 165: 77-91
2018
Fast, Visual and Interactive Semi-supervised Dimensionality Reduction
Dimitris Spathis, Nikolaos Passalis, Anastasios Tefas
ECCV Efficient Feature Representation Learning workshop (CEFRL @ ECCV 2018), Munich, Germany
2017
Diagnosing Asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease with Machine Learning
Dimitris Spathis, Panayiotis Vlamos
Health Informatics Journal, 25(3): 811–827 (issue published in 2019)
Class-based Prediction Errors to Detect Hate Speech with
Out-of-vocabulary Words
Joan Serra, Ilias Leontiadis, Dimitris Spathis, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn, Athena Vakali
ACL Abusive Language Online workshop (ALW @ ACL 2017), Vancouver, Canada
2016
A comparison between semi-supervised and supervised text mining techniques on detecting irony in greek political tweets
Basilis Charalampakis, Dimitris Spathis, Elias Kouslis, Katia Kermanidis
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 51: 50-57
2015
Detecting Irony on Greek Political Tweets: A Text Mining Approach
Basilis Charalampakis, Dimitris Spathis, Elias Kouslis, Katia Kermanidis
International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks, Rhodes, Greece
2014
Glocal News: An Attempt to Visualize the Discovery of Localized Top Local News, Globally
Dimitris Spathis, Theofilos Mouratidis, Spyros Sioutas, Athanasios Tsakalidis
International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, Hong Kong, China
Preprints
Detecting sleep in free-living conditions without sleepdiaries: a device-agnostic, wearable heart rate sensing approach
Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo, Marius Posa, Dimitris Spathis, Kate Westgate, Nicholas Wareham, Cecilia Mascolo, Soren Brage, Joao Palotti
medRxiv preprint, 2021
Photo-Quality Evaluation based on Computational Aesthetics: Review of Feature Extraction Techniques
Dimitris Spathis
arXiv preprint, 1612.06259, 2016
🧐 Academic service
I take great joy in participating in the academic community, contributing and learning from peer review. I am serving on the following international conferences and journals:
Program Committee (PC): AAAI 2021-, IJCAI 2020, KDD 2020- (PC & Session Chair), SDM 2022, Sensiblend @ Ubicomp 2021
Organizer: Tutorial on federated learning for mobile sensing at MobiCom 2021 (to be held April 2022, co-organized with Stefanos Laskaridis & Mario Almeida at Samsung AI)
Reviewer: Nature Digital Medicine, Nature Scientific Reports, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, CHI, Ubicomp/IMWUT, CHIL, ICASSP, Expert Systems with Applications, Neurocomputing, WWW/The Web Conference, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Sensors, ICWSM, ICPR, and more.
📢 Talks
COVID-19 Sounds: A Large-Scale Audio Dataset for Digital Respiratory Screening
- 📍 NeurIPS'21, virtual event, Australia — December 7, 2021
- 📍 NeurIPS MeetUp Cambridge, University of Cambridge, UK — December 8, 2021
- 📍 MobiUK'21, virtual event, UK — July 6, 2021
- 📍 CHIL'21, virtual event, USA — April 8, 2021
- 📍 NeurIPS'20 ML4MH workshop, virtual event, Canada — December 12, 2020
- 📍 Jesus College Postgraduate Conference, virtual event, UK — March 5, 2021
- 📍 Barclays Eagle Lab, Cambridge, UK — March 12, 2020
- 📍 KDD'19, Anchorage, USA — August 4, 2019
- 📍 PervasiveHealth'19, Trento, Italy — May 20, 2019
- 📍 MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, UK — March 5, 2019
- 📍 Ocado, Barcelona, Spain & Hatfield, UK (remote) — July 10, 2019
- 📍 Facebook PhD Open House, London, UK — October 25, 2018
- 📍 MobiUK'18, Cambridge, UK — September 13, 2018
- 📍 ACL'17 Abusive Language workshop, Vancouver, Canada — August 4, 2017
- 📍 EANN'15, Rhodes, Greece — September 25, 2015
🗞️ Press
Audio AI for COVID-19: Cambridge University (1), Cambridge University (2), BBC, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Times, Forbes, Slate, DailyMail, ITV, IEEE Spectrum, TheNextWeb, STAT, EPFL, TheScientist, The Register, KDnuggets, NPR/WBUR, Royal Society of Biology, Lancet Digital Health, Psychology Today, El Pais, RAI, Corriere della Sera, DerStandard.
AI for wearables: VentureBeat, Business Insider, ACM TechNews, National Committee for Quality Assurance.
Big data for psychology: TEDx Talk.
🎒 Mentoring
I find it incredibly stimulating working with students in research projects. Some recent undergrad and graduate theses I supervised:
- Chi Ian Tang — Self-supervised learning in timeseries (papers at IMWUT & NeurIPS-W)
- Benjamin Searle — Predicting compulsive behaviours with watches (paper at MobileHCI)
- Kevalee Shah — Contrastive learning in activity/clinical timeseries (paper at ML4H)
- Chuen Low — Pure attention models for medical timeseries (ongoing)
I have also been a teaching assistant for the following undergraduate courses:
- Machine Learning & Real-World Data (U. of Cambridge)
- Mobile & Sensor Systems (U. of Cambridge)
- Scientific Computing (U. of Cambridge)
- Numerical Analysis (Aristotle University)
🎠 Playground
“The next big thing in technology often starts off looking like a toy”
Quantifying name-dropping
Communitypoprefs.com is a data visualization website, where we present every pop-culture reference over the course of 5 seasons of the TV series Community.
Map out your music taste on Spotify
Visualizing my favourite songs on Spotify with dimensionality reduction and anomaly detection. Data essay published in Cuepoint Magazine, Medium's premier music publication.
Children books and childish language?
Text mining Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings books. Data essay featured in Medium's Editor Picks.
Anonymize kids' faces before posting online
Mobile app with face recognition, age estimation, & emotion recognition to blur kids or replace their face with emotion-based emoji. Developed during HackZurich 2018.
Discover top local news globally
Glocalne.ws was a mashup of Google News and Google Maps. Unfortunately it is now defunct due to API discontinuance.
Composing music and text with Recurrent Neural Networks
Training neural networks on massive amounts of musical notation and literature and letting them create their own art. Essay in Greek but you can still see/listen to the results.
🕳️🐇 Personal
Non-academic things about me: I love music, both playing and listening. I am mostly into art rock and indie folk, with the occasional exception of some well-crafted pop. Although I am an accordionist by training, over the last few years I've been playing mostly piano and ukulele. In a previous life, I performed in the critically acclaimed band The Children of the Oldness (aka Kore Ydro). You can listen to the album "Consortium in Amato" here.
I also enjoy street photography and in particular playing with light—photography comes from Greek φως (light) and γραφή (writing), or drawing with light. A subset of my pictures is on Flickr while I had my 15" of fame when one of my landscapes was featured in the Huffington Post.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I'm always on the lookout for ways to move items from the "non-academic list" to the "academic list"—let me know if you'd like to help!