Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist with over 25 years of research experience in Artificial Intelligence, Human Computer Interaction and Mobile Computing at MIT (1995-2000), Microsoft Research (2000-2007), and as the first female Scientific Director at Telefonica R&D (2007-2016), the first Chief Data Scientist at DataPop Alliance (2015-present) and the first Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone (2017-2019).
She is co-founder and vice-president of ELLIS (European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems) and co-founder and director of the Alicante ELLIS Unit, devoted to research on "Human(ity)-centric Artificial Intelligence".
Between 2020 and 2022, she was Commissioner for the President of the Valencian Region on AI Strategy and Data Science to fight COVID-19. She led at team with ~20 data scientists and co-led the winning team of the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge.
She graduated top of her class and top of Spain in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the ETSIT at the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid (UPM), Spain in 1994. She received her PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, in June 2000. From July 2000 until November 2007, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. After 12 years in the US, she returned to Spain to co-create the Research organization at Telefonica R&D by creating and leading an internationally recognized industrial research team in Barcelona, which she did until October 2016.
She is honored to be the first female computer scientist in Spain named both a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM and an ACM Fellow. She is also a Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence (eurAI) and an IEEE Fellow. She is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.
She received an Honorary PhD from the University Miguel Hernandez in September of 2018 and is the only Spanish scientist inducted in the SIGCHI Academy.
She has carried out foundational work in computational models of individual and aggregate human behavior using machine learning techniques, which has helped set the path for today’s intelligent systems. Her research has contributed to the development of intelligent multimodal interfaces, context-aware mobile computing applications, personalized services and Big Data for Social Good.
Her research interests include artificial intelligence, health monitoring, mobile computing, personal and big data analysis, statistical machine learning and data mining, ubiquitous computing, personalization, computational social sciences and human computer interaction.
Her passion is to have positive impact in the world through her research and to inspire others (particularly girls) to pursue careers in science and technology.
Nuria has published over 160 scientific papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters. Her work has been widely recognized by the scientific community with over 21000 citations . According to Google Scholar Nuria is one of the most cited female computer scientists in Spain . Nuria has ~40 patent applications and granted patents.
She has received a number of awards, including the King James I Award in New Technologies (2021), the Abie Technology Leadership Award (2021), European Data Scientist of the Year (2019), the Spanish Angela Robles National Computer Science Award (2016), European Digital Woman of the Year (2016), the Gaudi Gresol Award to the Excellence in Science and Technology (2016), the Spanish Ada Byron Award by the University of Deusto (2016), ACM ICMI 2014 10-year Technical Impact Award (2014), a Rising Talent Award by the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society (2009), MIT’s ‘TR100 Young Innovators Award’ (2004) and the First Spanish Award of EECS graduates (1994). Her publications have received 3 best paper awards (since 2012), 5 nominations to best paper award (since 2009) and a Special Mention Award from the Pattern Recognition Society as an outstanding publication (2000).
She also invests significant efforts to service for the scientific community as a regular member of the technical program committee of the top international conferences in her field and a member of the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Multimedia, Frontiers in Digital Health, IEEE Computational Social Systems and Trends in HCI. She is a member of the ethics panel of Orange D4D (2015) and a member of the PhD thesis committee of several students.
She has been an advisor to many universities, research centers and institutions, including the ETIC at the UPF, LASIGE at the University of Lisbon, the eHealth Center at the UOC and the department of Informatics at King’s College London. She has been in the advisory board to Mahindra Comviva. She has been a member of a high level advisory board to the Spanish Secretary of State of Research and Innovation and in the AI advisory committee in the Spanish Government. She is a member of the strategy advisory committee to the Valencian Innovation Agency. She is the Spanish representative in the Theme Advisory Group of the European Central Bank, chartered with supporting the re-design of the euro bills.
She has held a co-chair role in over 20 top-tier peer-reviewed international conferences since 2009, including technical program co-chair of IUI 2009 and of MIR 2010, general conference co-chair of UMAP 2011, industry-day co-chair of IJCAI 2011, track co-chair of ACM WWW 2013, track founder and co-chair in ACM MM 2014, demo chair of IEEE ICDM 2016, track chair of IEEE Mobile Data Management 2016, ACM Digital Health 2016, general conference co-chair of EAI Pervasive Health 2017, track co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2017, PC co-chair of ECML-PKDD 2021.
She regularly gives invited talks about her research both for scientific and the general public. She has been a keynote speaker at IEEE EUSIPCO 2011, European Wireless Conference 2014, ACM and IEEE MODELS 2014, NTTS 2015, IEEE Int. Conf. on Data Science and Advanced Analytics 2015, ACM Digital Health 2015, ICEIS 2015, ACM CERI 2016, IEEE Int Conf on Intelligent Environments 2016, IEEE IntelliSys 2017 and ACM MMSys 2018, among others.
She has spoken to government bodies and public institutions, including the Spanish Senate and the ITU, and has participated as an expert in several panels organized by the European Commission, the GSMA, the OECD/PARIS21, United Nations and the Royal Statistical Society, among others.
From a societal perspective, Nuria has a passion for making science and technology available to the general public and to inspire future generations –and especially girls - to study STEM disciplines. She devotes significant effort to this purpose. She has given invited talks to large audiences –including two TEDx talks and a WIRED talk —and to thousands of teenagers as part of Catalonia’s Science Week and the Ingenious! European project. She is part of the jury of several STEM related initiatives, including the STEM challenge, the I national inter-school competition in robotics and programming in Spain, and the MIT TR35 Young Innovator award (Spanish and Colombian editions).
Education is a key pillar to ensure that future generations are prepared to contribute to the society of the future. Hence, she has co-organized the first TEDxBarcelona event devoted to emerging education with over 1400 participants, and the first Social Thinking course in Spain with ~200 participants. She has also made a proposal in several schools for a computer science curriculum since kindergarten and has written about the concept of digital erudites in contrast to the fallacy of digital natives.
Her work has been featured over 200 times in newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations both in Spain and internationally, including BBC News, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, The Economist, El PAIS, el Mundo, National Public Radio (NPR), ABC Good Morning America, RTVE, RNE, Actualidad Economica, TechCrunch, The Guardian. She has been a technology writer for Tecno2000 magazine and ‘El Pais’ newspapers, among others. Her 2015 article on the future of mobile phones is in the top 10 most read technology articles in EL PAIS in 2015.
She has been featured as the 5th top female influecer in Big Data worldwide by OnAlytica (2017), one of the top 11 Artificial Intelligence influencers worldwide by PioneeringMinds (2017), one of Spain's wonderful minds in Technology (2017), in Glamour magazine as 'one of the top female directors in Spain' (2015), in EL PAIS Sunday magazine as one of a few 'female directors in technology' (2012), named Rising Talent by the Women's Forum for Economy & Society (October 2009), one of the ' 13 most influential young women in Spain ' (MujerHoy Magazine, 2012), one of ' 100 leaders of the future ' by Capital Magazine (May 2009) and one of the 'Generation XXI: 40 Spanish youngsters that will make news in the Third Millenium ' by EL PAIS (2000).
She is proficient in multiple foreign languages and studied classical ballet for 12 years. She is happily married and is the proud mother of 3 children. Her hobbies have included traveling, cinema, art, classical music, yoga, Formula Dodge racing, dance and swimming.
Short Biography
Nuria Oliver, is Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance, Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vodafone Institute and co-founder of ELLIS (The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) and co-founder of the Alicante ELLIS Unit, devoted to research on "Human(ity)-centric Artificial Intelligence". She is a Telecommunications Engineer from the UPM and holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Between 2020 and 2022, she was Commissioner for the President of the Valencian Region on AI Strategy and Data Science to fight COVID-19. She led at team with ~20 data scientists and co-led the winning team of the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge.
She has over 25 years of research experience in the areas of human behavior modeling and prediction from data and human-computer interaction. She has been a researcher at Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA), the first female Scientific Director at Telefonica R&D for over 8 years and the first Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone globally (2017-2019).
Her work in the computational modeling of human behavior using Artificial Intelligence techniques, human-computer interaction, mobile computing and Big Data analysis - especially for the Social Good is well known with over 160 scientific publications that have received more than 18000 citations and a ten best paper award nominations and awards. She is co-inventor of over 40 filed patents and she is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences. Her work has contributed to the improvement of services, the creation of new services, the definition of business strategies and the creation of new companies.
Nuria is the only Spanish researcher recognized by the ACM as Distinguished Scientist (2015) and Fellow (2017) at the same time. She is also a Fellow of the IEEE (2017) and the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (2016). She has received an Honorary Doctorate from the Miguel Hernandez University (2018). Dr. Oliver is the youngest and fourth female member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering (2018) and an elected member of the Academia Europaea (2016) and CHI Academy (2018), where she is the only Spanish scientist.
As an advisor, Dr. Oliver is a member of the scientific advisory committee of several European universities, the Gadea Ciencia Foundation, Mahindra Comviva and the Future Digital Society, among others. In addition, she advises the Government of the Valencia Community, Spain and the European Commission on issues related to Artificial Intelligence. She is a member of a Global Future Council at the World Economic Forum.
Dr. Oliver is a member of the program committee of the main international congresses in her research areas. She has also been a member of the organizing committee of 19 international conferences and is a member of the editorial committee of five international magazines.
Dr. Oliver's work has been recognized internationally with numerous awards. She graduated top of her class at the UPM and received the First National Telecommunications Award (1004). She is the first Spanish scientist to receive the MIT TR100 (today TR35) Young Innovator Award (2004) and the Rising Talent award by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society (2009). She has been awarded Data Scientist of the Year in Europe (2019), Engineer of the Year Award by the COIT (2018), the Medal for Business and Social Merit by the Valencian Government (2018), the European Digital Woman of the Year award (2016) and the Spanish National Computer Science Angela Robles Award (2016).
She has been named one of the top 11 Artificial Intelligence influencers worldwide by Pioneering Minds (2017), one of Spanish wonderful minds in technology by EL PAIS newspaper (2017), “an outstanding female director in technology” (El PAIS, 2012), one of “100 leaders for the future” (Capital, 2009) and one of the “40 youngsters who will mark the next millennium” (El PAIS, 1999).
Nuria firmly believes in the value of technology to improve the quality of people, both individually and collectively, and dedicates her professional life to achieving it.
Her passion is to improve people’s quality of life, both individually and collectively, through technology. She is also passionate about scientific outreach. Hence, she regularly collaborates with the media (press, radio, TV) and gives non-technical talks about science and technology to broad audiences, and particularly to teenagers, with a special interest on girls. She has given talks to more than 10,000 adolescents, has contributed to the book "Digital natives do not exist" (Deusto, 2017) with the chapter "Digital scholars", has written articles for EL PAIS, The Guardian, TechCrunch among others and has been co -organizer of large congresses with thousands of attendees, such as the first TEDxBarcelona event dedicated to emerging education, the I and II International Congress on Artificial Intelligence and the I International Congress on Aging. Her talks on WIRED, TEDx and similar events have been viewed thousands of times.
Twitter: @nuriaoliver
URL: http://www.nuriaoliver.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuria_Oliver