At the end of last week, Anita defended her thesis titled ‘Capturing and exploiting citation knowledge for the recommendation of scientific publications’ which explored various notions of citations for recommending scientific publications; notions such as citation graph, citation intention, citation context, citation section and citation proximity. By exploiting such knowledge, she has proposed various novel recommendation methods and benchmarks.

On the day of her PhD viva, she started with a short presentation showcasing her work to her examiners, Dr Paul Mulholland, and Dr Saul Vargas. Before the questions and discussion started, the examiners were very thoughtful and provided her with a metareview which actually helped her settle down her nerves. She enjoyed the examination process as she felt it was more of a discussion with experts within the domain. The discussion and feedback were for making the thesis better and the whole experience was very pleasant.

Of course, the whole PhD journey and this success would not have possible without the support of her supervisors, Dr Miriam Fernandez, Dr Ivan Cantador and Dr Anna DeLiddo. They provided her guidance, support and exemplary supervision in every possible way.  They were always there for her, especially when a paper got rejected, they motivated her to move forward, make the work better and submit in a better venue.