Aritz Bilbao Jayo news

Patient enrollment started for the BD4QoL clinical trial

The “Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza” hospital (S. Giovanni Rotondo, Italy) started the enrolment of the patients who participate in the prospective trial for the use of the BD4QoL platform starting from April 11th, 2022. The first 18 patients are using the BD4QoL apps to collect quality of life data and will be followed up for 24 months. Patients will report their perceived quality of life using the web-based standard questionnaires from the European Organization for the Research on Cancer (EORTC) at the enrolment and every six months as part of their follow-up visits. Two thirds of the study participants will also collect data on their physical and social activities, sleep, and emotional status by using the BD4QoL mobile apps.

Three innovations by MORElab members in the BD4QoL project included in the Innovation Radar platform of the European Commission

The Innovation Radar of the European Commission has selected three innovations in which MORElab members Aitor Almeida and Aritz Bilbao participated in the BD4QoL project funded by Horizon 2020. The selected innovations are:

Innovation Title: BD4QoL mobile app modules for unobtrusive collection of data for assessment of Quality of Life in Head and Neck Cancer survivors;
- Market Maturity of the Innovation: Business Ready
- Market Creation Potential of the innovation: High
- In collaboration with IBM IRELAND LIMITED and DOTSOFT

Innovation Title: AI-based models, for the prediction of QoL trajectories in HNC survivors;
- Market Maturity of the Innovation: Exploring
- Market Creation Potential of the innovation: High
- In collaboration with UNIVERSITETET I OSLO and FONDAZIONE IRCCS ISTITUTO NAZIONALE DEI TUMORI

Innovation Title: BD4QoL Ontology for Head and Neck Cancer survivorship domain modelling;
- Market Maturity of the Innovation: Business Ready
- Market Creation Potential of the innovation: Minor
- In collaboration with UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE MADRID and DOTSOFT

The EU-funded BD4QoL project aims to improve HNC survivors’ quality of life by developing a person-centred monitoring and follow-up plan. It will use artificial intelligence and Big Data collected from mobile devices, in combination with multi-source clinical and socioeconomic data and patients’ reported outcomes. Analysis of the quality of life indicators collected over time will facilitate early detection of risks, prevent long-term effects of treatment, and inform patients and caregivers for personalised interventions.

BD4QoL project mentioned as flagship initiative by the European Commission Sub-group on Cancer

BD4QoL project mentioned as flagship initiative by the European Commission Sub-group on Cancer under the Steering Group on Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Management of Non-Communicable Diseases on 12 November 2021.

How does BD4QoL work?

The project consortium has created a new video explaining how the BD4QoL project helps survivors of health and neck cancer: https://youtu.be/90YmWxtytn0

Participation on the AI4Good Digital Workshop

As part of the events organized by the SHAPE-ID project, MORElab members Aitor Almeida and Aritz Bilbao took part in the AI4Good Digital Workshop. They presented the AI contributions that are being done by the BD4QoL project in order to improve the prediction and modelling of health-related quality of life in head and neck cancer survivors.

The following discussion with both stakeholders (clinicans and patients) and researchers helped us to better understand the need of interdisciplinary cooperation between the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) and STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and other disciplines.

Aritz Bilbao, new doctor in MORElab

On June 23rd, 2020, MORElab's member Aritz Bilbao Jayo has been honored with the PhD recognition. His dissertation, entitled "From Political Manifestos to Social Networks: the automation of Political Discourse Analysis using Contextual Information" was advised by Dr. Aitor Almeida.

The VIVA panel was formed by:

Sara Tonelli (President, FBK/University of Trento)
Arkaitz Zubiaga (Queen Mary University of London)
Diego López de Ipiña (Universidad de Deusto)

Kick-off meeting of the BD4QoL project

Aitor Almeida and Aritz Bilbao assisted to the kick-off meeting of the Big Data Models and Intelligent tools for Quality of Life monitoring and participatory empowerment of head and neck cancer survivors (BD4QoL) project in Milan the 30th and 31st of January. The University of Deusto is one of the 13 partners of the project.

The number of treatment options available for head and neck cancer (HNC) has increased in the last decade thanks to advanced technologies. While current post-treatment care plans focus on functional and health conditions, there are socioeconomic determinants of quality of life that also need to be addressed. The EU-funded BD4QoL project aims to improve HNC survivors’ quality of life by developing a person-centred monitoring and follow-up plan. It will use artificial intelligence and Big Data collected from mobile devices, in combination with multi-source clinical and socioeconomic data and patients’ reported outcomes. Analysis of the quality of life indicators collected over time will facilitate early detection of risks, prevent long-term effects of treatment, and inform patients and caregivers for personalised interventions.

Aritz Bilbao Jayo participated in the "The 15th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2018)".

Aritz Bilbao Jayo participated in the "The 15th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2018)" held in Guangzhou(China) from October 8th to 12th, 2018.

He presented the paper "Embedding-level attention and multi-scale convolutional neural networks for behaviour modelling " authored by Aitor Almeida, Gorka Azkune and himself.

Aritz Bilbao Jayo participated in the "56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics"

Aritz Bilbao Jayo participated in the "56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics" (ACL2018) held in Melbourne(Australia) from July 15th to 20th, 2018.

He presented the paper "Political discourse classification in social networks using context sensitive convolutional neural networks" authored by himself and Aitor Almeida.

Assistance to the Deep Learn summer school

Last week (17-21 of July), Bilbao had the pleasure of being host for theInternational Deep Learning Summer School. Five researchers of the group attended this event - Aitor Almeida, Gorka Azkune, Aritz Bilbao, Adrián Núñez and David Buján- and were able to meet with well known researchers in the Deep Learning field such as Li Deng, Michael Mozer and Marc’Aurelio Ranzato.

We have published several datasets related to the political activities on social networks

We have made public several datasets related to the political activities on social networks. The liberated datasets are:

Political party and candidate tweets for the campaing period of the 2016 Spanish general election. This dataset contains the political party and candidate tweets for the campaign period (10th to 24th of June) of the 2016 Spanish general election. The dataset contains 35,624 tweets. https://github.com/aitoralmeida/spanish_general_election_2016
Political party and candidate tweets for the campaing period of the 2015 Spanish general election. This dataset contains the political party and candidate tweets for the campaign period (4th to 18th of December) of the 2015 Spanish general election. The dataset contains 45,804 tweets. https://github.com/aitoralmeida/spanish_general_election_2015
Twitter dataset for the 2014 European Parliament elections. This dataset contains the tweets for the campaign period (16th to 23th of April) of the 2014 European Parliament election. The dataset contais a total of 47,761 tweets. https://github.com/aitoralmeida/european_parliament_election_2014

New predoctoral grants for MORElab members

The past week our two first year predoctoral researchers, Aritz Bilbao and Adrián Núñez, received a predoctoral grant from the Basque Government for three years. This allows them to continue researching in their respective topics:

Aritz is working in Natural Language Processing with Neural Networks under the supervision of Dr. Aitor Almeida. Specifically, he is working in classifying political tweets.
Adrián is also working Neural Networks but applied to Human Activity Recognition with Egocentric Vision Images under the supervision of Dr. Gorka Azkune.

Congratulations to both of them and their directors, and also good luck in their thesis.

MORElab receives a NVIDIA GPU Grant

We would like to thank NVIDIA for the GPU donated to our research group via the academic GPU seeding program. The donated hardware will be used to train deep neural networks for the analysis of the political discourse, allowing us to shorten the training times of the neural networks.

Participation in DataBeers Euskadi II

MORElab members Aritz Bilbao and Aitor Almeida took part on the second DataBeers Euskadi in Bilbao, which was held in Icaza Colaborando and was organized by Decidata. Aritz and Aitor presented the work done in the areas of adversarial information retrieval and the analysis of the political discourse on social networks.

Attendance to SONOPA project’s Quarterly Meeting

MORELab members Aritz Bilbao and Aitor Almeida attended to the quarterly meeting of the SONOPA project that took place on the 25^th November 2015 in Bremen.

Open Data Day 2015

On February 20, MORElab research group and the "Diploma in Data Analysis, Research and Communication" organized the Open Data Day within the University of Deusto in Donostia/San Sebastián. For the third consecutive year, this event has been celebrated in conjunction with the International Open Data Hackathon. The meeting began with the talks by Imanol Argüeso (Open Data Euskadi), Leire Bardají (EuroHelp Consulting), Jorge Campanillas (Iurismática Abogados) and Iñaki Pariente de Prada (Basque Data Protection Authority). After the talks and throughout the day, the participants worked in these three workgroups:

Photos and videos of the meeting are available:

Jacathon Aragón Open Data

Between the 26th and 27th of september, MORElab's researchers Aritz Bilbao and Mikel Emaldi attended the "Jacathon" organized by Aragón Open Data in Jaca. The aim of this hackathon was to develop apps and services based on Aragón's Government Open Data portal and its Social Data API. The app developed by Aritz and Mikel consisted on a service for cleaning noise from Twitter scraper of Aragón Social Data API. The source is available on GitHub.