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Engineering & Informatics

Ph.D. Student Joana Barros

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researcher
 

Biography

I am a PhD student at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUI Galway and I am a part of the Natural Language Processing unit under the supervision of Dr Paul Buitelaar. In addition, I am also co-supervised by Dr Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann and Dr Jim Duggan. My research focuses on the Public Health domain, specifically on the field of disease surveillance and outbreak forecasting. I am mainly interested in the application of alternative sources of data available on the internet, such as social media and discussion fora, to assist in the monitoring and detection of disease outbreaks.

I have a Bachelor in Biology from the University of Porto (2010-2013) and a Master in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (specialisation in Bioinformatics) from the University of Lisbon (2013-2015). I was previously a part of the LaSIGE research unit (Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon) where I applied machine learning to detect drug side-effects.

Research Interests

Health Informatics
Public Health
Bioinformatics
Computational Biology
Natural Language Processing

Peer Reviewed Journals

  Year Publication
(2019) 'The Validity of Google Trends Search Volumes for Behavioral Forecasting of National Suicide Rates in Ireland'
Joana Barros, Ruth Melia, Kady Francis, John Bogue, Mary O’Sullivan, Karen Young, Rebecca A. Bernert, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann, Jim Duggan (2019) 'The Validity of Google Trends Search Volumes for Behavioral Forecasting of National Suicide Rates in Ireland'. International Journal Of Environmental Research And Public Health, 16 (17) [DOI] [Details]
(2018) 'Disease mentions in airport and hospital geolocations expose dominance of news events for disease concerns'
Joana Barros, Jim Duggan, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann (2018) 'Disease mentions in airport and hospital geolocations expose dominance of news events for disease concerns'. Journal Of Biomedical Semantics, [Details]

Conference Publications

  Year Publication
(2019) Digital Public Health
Joana Barros, Paul Buitelaar, Jim Duggan, and Dietrich Rebholz-Schumann (2019) Unsupervised Classification for Health Content on Twitter Digital Public Health [Details]
(2017) International Conference on Digital Health
Joana Barros (2017) Text Mining from Social Media for Public Health Applications International Conference on Digital Health London, United Kingdom, , pp.223-224 [Details]

Education

  Year Institution Qualification Subject
2015 University of Lisbon Master in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
2013 University of Porto Bachelor in Biology Biology

Modules Taught

  Term/Year Module Title Module Code Subject / Desc
2018/2019 Programming for Data Analytics CT5102 Lab Assistant
2017/2018 Programming for Data Analytics CT5102 Lab Assistant