Professor Ana Basiri
- Professor of Geospatial Data Science (School of Geographical & Earth Sciences)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2399-1797Biography
Ana Basiri is a Professor in Geospatial Data Science, a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow, the Director of the Centre for Data Science and AI, and the Royal Academy of Engineering's EngineeringX Champion at the University of Glasgow. Ana leads a team on Geospatial Data Science Group https://gdsglasgow.github.io/
Ana serves and advises several national and governmental offices, including the Office for National Statistics' Statistics (ONS) Methodological Assurance Review Panel, Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology’s Geospatial Commission, Co-chairs the Scottish Government’s ScotStat Board and Location Data Scotland. She is a Royal Academy of Engineering Safer End of Engineered Life Champion and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Navigation. Ana is the University of Glasgow’s academic lead for the Alan Turing Institute University Network, and leads a strategic partnership between the Turing and DSO in Singapore.
Ana has given keynotes and invited talks in more than 15 international conferences, including GISRUK 2022, Spatial Data Science 2023, SDSS2021 to name a few. Ana organised and chaired several international conferences, including Chairing 31st Conference of GISRUK2023 and FOSS4G2022, 16th International Conference on Location Based Services 2021. She has published more than 50 peer-reviewed journal papers and books chapters, presented her research in more than 50 conference papers, supervised 19 (8 graduated) PhD, received several honours and awards including EU Role Model in Science. Ana gave talks in public events, policy debates, science festivals about different aspects of AI, trustworthy robotics and navigation technologies, and featured in several news article and magazines, just to name a few (with The Herald on digital immortality and on the danger of technology putting words in mouths, and The Sun on the risks of AI in digital marketing), Ana has received several awards and prizes, including Women Role Model in Science by Alexander Humboldt and European Commission and Marie Curie Alumni, Royal Institute of Navigation NavNews magazine, and Royal Academy of Engineering EngineerinX Champion.
Ana is the University of Glasgow’s Lead for accelerating and facilitating collaborations and partnerships with the Alan Turing Institute (as the Turing Network Development Lead), where she also leads, as the programme lead, the partnership between the institute’s Defence and Security Programme and Defense and Security Organisation in Singapore (ATI-DSO partnership) with £3M funding, and also co-chairs a group at the Alan Turing Institute on responsible data science.
Research interests
Her research split between developing (theoretical and applied) solutions that consider unavailability and biases in data as useful sources of data to make inferences about the underlying reasons that caused missingness or biases as well as developing AI-enabled solutions for Geospatial problems. For these, she collaborates with world-leading academic, government, and industrial partners. Her research and team have been funded by some prestigious awards, including the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, Marie Curie Fellowship, and ERC starting grants, and several programme and strategic grant. She leads an interdisciplinary team of postdocs, PhD students and academics, funded by ERC, MRC, ESRC, NERC, EPSRC, RAEng, Alan Turing Institute, and Royal Society.
She examines the quality-quantity tradeoff in big geospatial data, addressing the complexities of integrating traditional and modern data sources. She leverages missing data as a tool to uncover the factors behind data gaps, transforming these challenges into opportunities for deeper insights. Her research extends into artificial intelligence, where she works with multilingual, multimodal data to enhance location extraction, for real-world challenges to harness diverse data sources to tackle some of society’s most pressing challenges.
For details on the current and past projects go to: https://gdsglasgow.github.io/
Grants
- UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, “Missing Data as Useful Data” Grant No. [MR/Y011856/1]: £581,513 May 2024—April 2027 (PI)
- The Alan Turing Institute, Grant No. [317199-2]: Multi-Lingual and Multi-Modal Location Information Extraction (Multi-LM), £394,911, May 2022—October 2024 (PI)
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Grant No. [ES/L011921/1]: ESRC Urban Big Data, £13,412,159, Jan 2014- Sept 202 (CoI)
- NERC Programme Grant (£10,227,122) (Co-I) - “Delivering a Climate Resilient City through City-University Partnership: Glasgow as a Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation (GALLANT)”, Jan 2022- Jan 2027
- Royal Academy of Engineering, EngineeringX Champion, “Safer End of Life for Digital Data”, £65,627 (PI)
- The Alan Turing Institute, Grant No. [317199-1]: ATI-DSO Network lead, £4,000,4000, May 2019—Aug 2025 (PI)
- UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, Grant No. [MR/S01795X/2]: Indicative Data Science: 3D Model of cities using GNSS degradation, £1,247,233, June 2020—April 2024 (PI)
- The Alan Turing Institute, Grant No. [317199-1]: ATI-DSO partnership Theme lead, £267,589, May 2019—Aug 2025 (PI)
- Roche- The Alan Turing Institute, “A Coherent Framework for Bayesian Modelling and Imputation to deal with Structured Missingness” Grant No. [318754], Aug 2022- Aug 2024, £250,403 (CoI)
- ESRC Advanced Quantitative Method Supervisor Award, “Big Data- Good Data: Understanding Society by combining survey data and new forms of data”, Grant No. [ES/P000681/2815847/1], £92,377, Sept 2021- Oct 2025
- University of Glasgow, Centre for Data Science and AI, internal award, £3,500,687, Sept 2024- Oct 2027 (Director)
- The Alan Turing Institute, Grant No. [TNDC2@014], Glasgow-Turing Network Development Award, £25,000, February 2022- September 2022 (lead)
- ERC Staring Grant, Grant agreement ID [679097], UrbanOccupationsOETR: Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, € 1,497,500.52, (CoI share: £212,500) Oct 2016- September 2022 (CoI)
- EPSRC, Grant No. [EP/N509577/1- 1936499], Transport and Ageing: An Examination into Digitally Enabled Flexible Public Transport Services and the Opportunities and Barriers for Older Citizens, part-time studentship, £121,034, October 2017- September 2027.
- Royal Society Research Grant, Grant No. [RSG/R180396]: Crowdsourced GNSS Data for Indoor Positioning, £5,760, March 2018 – August 2019 (PI)
- Alzheimer's Society UK, Grant No. [AS-SF-14-005]: Scaling the Peaks; Understanding the barriers and drivers to providing and using dementia friendly community services in rural areas: the impact of location, cultures and community in the Peak District National Park on sustaining service innovations, £279,112 July 2015- June 2019 (CoI)
- Advance Award– Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) Women in Science Fellowship, (Navigational Suggestion Inference Using Crowd-Sourced Tracking Data Analysis, [August 2013] (Fellowship not taken up to accept EU Marie Curie Fellowship), €117,803.
Supervision
https://gdsglasgow.github.io/profiles/
There are several funded, partially funded, and self-funded PhD opportunities within our projects, please contact ana.basiri@glasgow.ac.uk
- Baird, Jack
Data Analytics for Urban Environmental Planning - Polat Kayali, Merve
Visualisation of Missing Geospatial Data using Augmented Reality - Sutton, Dominick
Using Spatial Data to Understand Missing Data Mechanisms - WANG, Yu
Multi sensor positioning for urban canyon navigation - Yuan, Xinyi
Urban Renewal Potential: Multi-criteria Evaluation Model Supported by Digital Twin System
Professional activities & recognition
Research fellowships
- 2019 - 2023: UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship
- 2019: Royal Institute of Navigation
- 2020 - 2022: ERC Starting Grant
- 2013 - 2015: Marie Curie Fellowship
Grant committees & research advisory boards
- 2019 - 2023: UKRI-EPSRC, Future Leaders Fellowship
- 2018 - 2020: Royal Society, Research Grant
- 2021 - 2021: EPSRC, ICT SAT
Editorial boards
- 2019 - Now: Editor in Chief of Journal of Navigation
- 2019 - Now: Associate Editor of IET Smart Cities
Supplementary
- Professor Ana Basiri holds a chair position in Geospatial Data Science and is a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow. Ana works on developing solutions that consider missingness, unavailability, and biases in data as a useful source of data to make inference about the underlying reasons that caused missingness or biases. This is particularly a challenge for 'new forms of data' such as social media, crowdsourced and self-reporting data. A good example of this includes extracting the 3D map of cities using the patterns of blockage, reflection, and attenuation of the GPS signals (or other similar signals), that are contributed by the volunteers/crowd. In the era of big data, open data, social media and crowdsourced data when “we are drowning in data”, gaps and unavailability, representativeness and bias issues associated with them may indicate some hidden problems or reasons allowing us to understand the data, society and cities better. Ana leads a team of an interdisciplinary team and collaborates with world-leading academic and industrial partners, including Ordnance Survey GB, Uber, Alan Turing Institute, and engage with the public, policymakers and government. Ana is the Editor in Chief of Journal of Navigation and Associate/Guest Editor of several high impact journals including IET Smart city and International Journal Geographical Information Science. She has received several awards and prizes, including Women Role Model in Science by Alexander Humboldt and European Commission Marie Curie Alumni. She joined the University of Glasgow on 1st June 2020, before this I was a lecturer at University College London (UCL) Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), a European Research Council fellow at the University of Southampton, a Marie Curie Fellow at The University of Nottingham, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Maynooth University, Ireland.
Additional information
Please have a look at some of our projects and updates on https://gdsglasgow.github.io/ and contact me via ana.basiri@glasgow.ac.uk or abasiri@turing.ac.uk or a direct message on twitter for any collaboration, discussing ideas, postdoc, and studentship opportunities.
There are several funded, partially funded, and self-funded PhD and Postdoc opportunities within our projects. Contact me for more, I will never say no to a chat over a coffee!
