Celebrating the first BASIRA anniversary!

To my former, current, and future BASIRA students:

Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی ) once said: “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy”. Together, we joyfully celebrate research, producing knowledge, contributing to advancing science, respecting our human values, and supporting skilled minorities in low research and innovation countries. I thank all my students and congratulate them for their great achievements within a limited time frame.  You are all so amazing. The fact that I get to learn and grow beside you is an honor and a privilege I do not take lightly. You are my best teachers. I simply hope that what I have to offer will benefit you in your personal and professional lives.

 

The training I’ve undergone has exposed me to modern day developments in research and has given me the tools and the confidence to understand and critically assess the contents of research papers so that I can direct my own research. My training also placed the due attention on the importance of getting my ideas across and has significantly improved my communication skills with regard to scientific writing as well as presentations. As a teacher, Dr Rekik always managed to captivate my attention despite the difficulty of some of the material and was very good at rephrasing concepts and presenting them from multiple angles in order to aid my understanding. I would heavily recommend this training to anyone who would like to learn about machine learning, as well as to those who would like to gain the confidence necessary to direct their own research and hone their communication and critical thinking skills.” —Can Gafuroglu, Level 4 undergrad student, 2018. Research outputs: C. Gafuroğlu et al. MICCAI 2018, Granada, Spain (international conference acceptance rate 30% ). Sir James Black Award for outstanding research achievement —June 2018.

 

Becoming a member of Basira lab has been literally a turning point in my research career, hence my life. In addition to the technical skills I gained such as programming, scientific writing and critical thinking, my confidence and my self esteem have been boosted drastically. I worked on the identification of the autistic brain state where we introduced a new representation of brain network and developed a framework based on a novel unsupervised learning.  

The conducted research fruitfully resulted in a “Best Paper Award” at the international top medical image analysis conference (MICCAI 2017) workshop in Connnectomics in Neuroimaging. I strongly recommend this program where you will  benefit from a high quality supervision by Dr. Rekik and a constant care and encouragements to learn and deliver. You will definitely go through a journey that will represent your gate to a more successful career.—Mayssa Soussia, MSc student, 2017. Research outputs: M. Soussia et al. MICCAI-CNI 2017, Quebec, Canada (Best Paper Award).

 

 

While a member of BASIRA lab, I worked on a project aiming to improve on the classification accuracy of existing computer-aided dementia diagnosis methods. From this project, I have written a conference paper which has since been accepted into MICCAI 2018. Initially, I was completely inexperienced in the majority of concepts required, however, the training with Dr Rekik has allowed me to grasp these techniques to a much greater extent, to the point where I am confident in my skills. The training has not only introduced new skills such as the critique and writing of scientific papers, but has also helped me improve on others, such as my writing and coding ability.
This experience will undoubtedly help me in my future career due to the wide variety of skills I’ve developed which can be applicable to any career. The training has also been a gateway to careers in research and machine learning which I didn’t have before.
” —Rory Raeper, level 4 undergrad student, 2018. Research outputs: R. Raeper et al. MICCAI 2018, Granada, Spain.