Current Post

I’m a Research Fellow at Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. My research is done under the supervision of Prof. Ehud Reiter and Dr. Yvonne Freer.

My research involves the BabyTalk-Family (BT-Family) project, which is funded by the EPSRC. My research involves the use of Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology to covert clinical neonatal data into automatic daily summaries for parents of babies in Neonatal Intensive Care (NICU). This is done by using artificial intelligence and natural language technology to automatically analyse and summarise the information in a baby’s electronic patient record to produce reports focusing on matters of most interest to the parent. This work is based off a prototype that I developed during my PhD. I am currently involved in working to improve this prototype and to evaluate the usefulness of such a system with parents in a NICU.

Publications

• Saad Mahamood and Ehud Reiter (2011). Generating Affective Natural Language for Parents of Neonatal Infants. Proceedings of the 13^th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG). Nancy, France. September, 2011 — (PDF)
• Wendy Moncur, Saad Mahamood, Ehud Reiter, Yvonne Freer (2009). Involving healthcare consumers in knowledge acquisition for virtual healthcare. Virtual Healthcare Interaction 2009 (AAAI Fall Symposium Series) — (PDF)
• Albert Gatt, François Portet, Ehud Reiter, Jim Hunter, Saad Mahamood, Wendy Moncur, Somayajulu Sripada (2009). From Data to Text in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Using NLG Technology for Decision Support and Information Management. AI Communications, IOS Press.
• Saad Mahamood, Ehud Reiter, Chris Mellish (2008). Neonatal Intensive Care Information for Parents — An Affective Approach. Proceedings of the Twenty-First IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems. Jyväskylä, Finland. June, 2008. Editors: Seppo Puuronen, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Alexey Tsymbal, and Dah-Jye Lee. ISSN: 1063-7125 — (PDF)
• Saad Mahamood, Ehud Reiter, Chris Mellish (2007). A Comparison of Hedged and Non-hedged NLG Texts. Proceedings of the 11^th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG). Schloss Dagstul, Germany. June 2007. Editor: Stephan Busemann. ISSN: 0946-0098 — (PDF)

Technical Reports

• Saad Mahamood, Ehud Reiter, Chris Mellish (2008). Neonatal Intensive Care Information for Parents — An Affective Approach. Technical Report AUCS/TR0802.

Media

BabyTalk-Family Research Study Media (University of Aberdeen Press Release):

• BBC News Online — Parents of premature or ill babies needed for study
• STV News — Online updates scheme for neonatal babies
• The Scotsman — Baby Talk offers help to parents
• The Press and Journal — New system to ease neonatal stress

Qualifications

• PhD in Computing Science — University of Aberdeen (2010).
  Thesis Title: “Generating Affective Natural Language for Parents of Neonatal Infants”.
• MSc in Intelligent Systems — University of Sussex (2006).
  Thesis Title: “Automatically extracting spatially-referenced information from the web”.
• BSc in Computing Science — University of Wales, Aberystwyth (2005).

Contact

Dr. Saad Mahamood
Room 244, Meston Building,
Department of Computing Science,
King's College,
University of Aberdeen,
Aberdeen, AB24 3UE
Scotland, UK

Telephone: +44 (0) 1224 274173