Nuria Oliver
Appointment
International Scientific Advisory Committee member
CIFAR Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy Leadership
About
Dr. Nuria Oliver is co-founder and Director of the Institute of Humanity-centric AI (Alicante ELLIS Unit); Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance, Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vodafone Institute and co-founder and vice president of ELLIS (The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). She is a Telecommunications Engineer from the UPM and holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Dr. Oliver 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 eight years and the first Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone globally (2017-2019). Between 2020 and 2022 she served as Commissioner for the President of the Valencian Region on AI Strategy and Data Science to fight COVID-19. As an advisor, Dr. Oliver has been/is an advisor to several governments and the European Commission on issues related to artificial intelligence. She has been a member of a Global Future Council at the World Economic Forum and is a member of the Theme Advisory Group at the European Central Bank to propose the theme of the new euro banknotes. She is a member of the board of trustees of TTIC, a president of the board of trustees at UNED and has been a member of the board of Bankia.
Dr. Oliver’s work in the computational modeling of human behavior using artificial intelligence techniques, human-computer interaction, mobile computing and big data analysis – especially for social good – is well known with over 160 scientific publications that have received more than 22,000 citations and 11 best paper award nominations and awards. She is co-inventor of over 40 filed patents and a regular keynote speaker at international conferences.
Dr. Oliver’s work has been recognized internationally with numerous awards. 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), the Spanish National Computer Science Angela Robles Award (2016), the Abie Technology Leadership Award (2021) and the King James I Award on New Technologies (2021). She has been named one of the top 11 Artificial Intelligence influencers worldwide by Pioneering Minds (2017). 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).
Dr. Oliver firmly believes in the value of technology to improve the quality of life for people, both individually and collectively, and dedicates her professional life to achieving it. 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. Her talks on WIRED, TEDx and similar events have been viewed thousands of times.
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