Professor Ana Basiri works on developing (theoretical and applied) solutions to the challenges of ‘new forms of data’ such as missingness and biases. These solutions are based on the mindset that considers the bias, missingness, or low quality as a useful source of data to make inference about the underlying reasons for the missingness and bias. One application of this is 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 of biases and missingness. These novel solutions allow us to understand the data, society, and cities better.
For this, she 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 a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Chair of Geospatial Data Science at the University of Glasgow, 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.
Before joining the University of Glasgow, she was a lecturer at University College London, a European Research Council Fellow at the University of Southampton, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and a Postdoc Research Fellow at the Maynooth University of Ireland.
