Sofia de la Fuente Garcia (DTP Precision Medicine)

Research Fellow

Usher Institute of Population Health and Informatics
Deanery of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences
Edinburgh Medical School

Email: sofia.delafuente@ed.ac.uk
Web: Academia. edu profile

Usher Institute of Population Health and Informatics

Street: Nine Edinburgh Bioquarter, floor 2, 9 Little France
City
Post code: EH16 4UX

Street: Old Medical School, Doorway 1
Teviot Place
City: Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AG

Biography

Background

I have a background in Psychology (BSc Hons) and Methodology for Health Sciences (MSc), and have recently completed my PhD in Precision Medicine. The core of my doctoral research consisted of the development of a methodology for monitoring cognitive health through speech, with a focus on neurodegenerative diseases. I am currently working as a research fellow in Dr. Luz's lab, in order to continue and expand the development of this methodology. Other research interests include consciousness and cognition, as well as interdisciplinary research approaches for the promotion of well-being.

CV

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Qualifications

Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Edinburgh Teaching Award; April 2019).
MSc (Hons) Methodology for Behavioural and Health Sciences (dissertation: analysis of natural language in older adults). Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain, 2015.
BSc (Hons) Psychology (dissertation: past, current and future directions of classical conditioning). Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, 2017.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Human-Robot Interaction for Cognitive Training: exploring potential uses of Pepper the robot (Aldebaran - Softbank) for cognitive training and neuropsychological rehabilitation.
Usher Institute Public Engagement Group
Technology and Communication Translational Research Group: research on clinical communication and its potential applications in collaboration with the Centre for Dementia Prevention

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

UG Project supervision: Biomedical Science 2020-2021.

Tutor: Critical Analysis (Psychology 3rd year), 2019-2020

Tutor: PPLS Writing Centre, 2018-present.

Tutor and Demonstrator: Psychology 2A & 2B, 2018-2019.

Marker: Medical Informatics, 2017-2018.

Postgraduate teaching

Co-supervision of MSc dissertiation: Master in Public Health 2017-2018, 2018-2019.

Areas of interest for supervision

Early detection of dementia.

Open to topics in psychology, language and the mind.

Past PhD students supervised

Justin Baird-Delhaye, MSc Public Health 2018-2019

Tyra Tseng, MSc Public Health 2017-2018. Dissertation title: Detection of Cognitive Impairment Through Speech: A Secondary Acoustic Analysis of DementiaBank Corpus

Research

Research summary

Language and dementia, psycholinguistics, consciousess, integrated functions of the mind.

Current research interests

Psycholinguistics, linguistics, paralinguistics and acoustic features that may help predict dementia onset later in life.

Past research interests

Psychophysiology of language comprehension and neuroscience of memory

Affiliated research centres

Centre for Dementia Prevention

Projects

Current project grants

MRC Transitional Fellowship

Past project grants

DTP Precision Medicine. Funded awarded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), grant number MR/N013166/1

Conferences

Conference details

de la Fuente Garcia, S., Haider, F., & Luz, S. (2020, July). Cross-corpusFeature Learning between Spontaneous Monologue and Dialogue for AutomaticClassification of Alzheimer’s Dementia Speech. In2020 42nd Annual InternationalConference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC)(pp.5851-5855). IEEE.
Luz, S., Haider, F., de la Fuente Garcia, S., Fromm, D., & MacWhinney, B.(2020). Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech: TheADReSS Challenge.arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.06833
Scottish Dementia Research Consortium: "Prevent-ED: investigating dialogue features to prevent dementia". Glasgow (UK), 2019.
International Neuropsychological Society Conference: "Natural Language Processing for Cognitive Status Prediction, a Latent Semantic Analysis approach". Prague (Czech Republic), July 2018.
10th Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science: "Evaluating cognition through linguistic features". Dubrovnik (Croatia), May 2018.
11th Edition of its Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC): "A Method for Analysis of Patient Speech in Dialogue for Dementia Detection". May 2018.
2nd Human Brain Project Student Conference: "Detecting Cognitive Decline through Dialogue Processing". February 2018.

Media

Awards

Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (Edinburgh Teaching Award, 2019)

Research collaboration awards (UCM: 2014, UAM: 2015)

Academic excellence awards (Madrid, Spain; 2010, 2012)

Publications

de la Fuente Garcia, S., Ritchie, C., Luz, S. (in press). Artificial Intelligence,speech and language processing approaches to monitoring Alzheimer’s Disease:a systematic review.Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Luz, S., Haider, F., de la Fuente Garcia, S., Fromm, D., & MacWhinney, B.(2020). Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech: TheADReSS Challenge.arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.06833.
de la Fuente Garcia, S., Haider, F., & Luz, S. (2020, July). Cross-corpusFeature Learning between Spontaneous Monologue and Dialogue for AutomaticClassification of Alzheimer’s Dementia Speech. In2020 42nd Annual InternationalConference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC)(pp.5851-5855). IEEE.
Haider, F., de la Fuente, S., Luz, S. (early access). An Assessment of Paralinguistic Acoustic Features for Detection of Alzheimer’s Dementia in Spontaneous Speech. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. (DOI: 10.1109/JSTSP.2019.2955022).
de Frutos-Lucas, J. et al. (2019). Enhancement of posterior brain functional networks in bilingual older adults. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1–14. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000178).
de la Fuente, S., Ritchie, C., Luz, S. (2019). "Protocol for a conversation-based analysis study: PREVENT-ED investigates dialogue features that may help predict dementia onset in later life". BMJ Open (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026254).
Luz S, de la Fuente, S., Albert P. (2018). “A Method for Analysis of Patient Speech in Dialogue for Dementia Detection”. Resources and Processing of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive impairment. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Paris: France:35–42. http://lrec-conf.org/workshops/lrec2018/W31/pdf/5_W31.pdf
de la Fuente, S., Albert, P., Luz, S. (2018). "Detecting cognitive decline through dialogue processing". Frontiers Event Abstracts: 2nd Human Brain Project Student Conference, pp. 13-15.

This article was published on 13 Oct, 2020