Staff Profile

Who is Patricia?

A highly-skilled and experienced data scientist in developing innovative techniques, frameworks and software tools for generating, managing and analysing data.  Through her international career, she has developed an expertise in optimising  programming techniques, to not work with a small amount data, but also very large amount of data.  She has developed a unique method to integrate Java and R together. Patricia has also developed Cartesian Genetic Programming in order to evolve iterations without an internally encoded stopping criterion. She has also developed auto-constructive CGP for adapting a reproduction method to the needs of an algorithm search. 

In the last two decades, Patricia has become a programming experts in application development including web technologies, remote and non-disclosive data analysis, information systems, machine learning based on graph-based techniques, and generative hyper-heuristics.  Her mathematical, statistical, and  software engineering experience and skills brings an unique and innovative approach to her research. 

What is Patricia currently working on?

Since November 2018, Patricia has been working on the Data to knowledge project, Connected Health Cities, DataShield, and EUCAN connect.  Within a team, she is working on improving DataShield as a software. She is interested in bringing some machine learning techniques to the next version of DataShield.

She is writing her own blog too: Interesting computing

Generative Hyper-heuristics

Designing effective algorithms for solving computational hard problems is a difficult and time consuming task. Genetic Programming  can produce effectively human-competitive results, but those may not be comprehensible. Automatically generated algorithms look altogether  different  from the algorithms programmers are used to and can be illogical to human cognition. My research have explored that adding some complexity to a generative hyper-heuristics  has brought some human-understandability, robustness and scalability.

Remote and non-disclosive analysis of data

Patients entrust the medical providers with their data and its confidential access.  DataShield does not only allow provide a tool to remotely analyse datasets stored on remote locations, but also it provides some secure and non-disclosive summary of the data.  Patricia is interested to explore how some machine learning techniques could be used to move forward data science and data analytics to prevent disclosive results. 

Mathematics and Engineering

Patricia is highly experienced in teaching year 1 mathematical and engineering modules by distance learning. She has excelled in developing the problem solving and mathematical thinking to students with broad needs and experiences. 

Programming and data science

She has been teaching C, Java, PHP, JavaScript and Python to students studying through their degrees. She has demonstrated some innovative methods of teaching to maintain the students focused and developing the skills valued by employers. This includes communication, innovation, collaboration and problem-solving skills. Her teaching methods help the learners appreciating why a clean-code approach to teaching is beneficial in software engineering as well as other industries, such as space exploration.

In data science, her students are strongly encouraged to developed outstanding database, statistical, probability and programming skills in order to assess and evaluate current packages available on different platforms.

Interaction design

She has brought her unique pragmatic of teaching to communicate the needs to computer scientists to understand thoroughly the users of their applications and their needs. She has brought some enthusiasms to her tutees on the techniques to explore their users needs using some low and high profile prototypes. 

Computing and the industry

Her industry experience and understanding of the role of software as a medium to assist any organisations to complete their day-to-day tasks has benefited greatly her students. She is bringing the human aspects and techniques of how organisations and their employees can integrate software, business rules and data for their purpose.