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Department of Computer Science and Technology

ERC Grant winner

Professor Cecilia Mascolo, Professor of Mobile Systems and Co-Director of the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence, has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council.

The ERC has awarded €540 million in total to fund researchers working on pioneering projects that aim to solve the world's most pressing challenges. Mascolo is one of 5 Cambridge researchers to win a grant, and one of 47 in the UK, which received the highest number of grants of any participating country.

Professor Mascolo's research focuses on the use of mobile devices for medical diagnostics. Mascolo and her team will study how the microphone in mobile and wearable devices may be used to diagnose and monitor various health conditions, since sounds from the human body can be indicators of disease or the onset of disease.

While audio sensing in a mobile context is inexpensive to deploy and can reach people who may not have access to or be able to afford other diagnostic tests, it does come with challenges which threaten its use in clinical contexts: namely its power-hungry nature and the sensitivity of the data it collects. Mascolo’s ERC funding will support the development of a systematic framework to link sounds to disease diagnosis while addressing power consumption and privacy concerns by maximising the use of local hardware resources with power optimisation and accuracy.

This story is adapted from an article on the University of Cambridge website by Sarah Collins.


Published by Jonathan Goddard on Friday 29th March 2019