Nuria Oliver - Biography#

Nuria Oliver, is Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone, Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance and Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vodafone Institute. She has over 20 years of research experience in the areas of human behavior modeling and prediction from data and human-computer interaction. She holds a PhD in perceptual intelligence from MIT. She worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research for over 7 years and as the first female Scientific Director at Telefonica R&D in Barcelona for over 8 years. At the end of 2016 she was named Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance and in early 2017 she also joined Vodafone as the first Director of Research in Data Science. In addition, she is Chief Scientific Advisor to the Vodafone Institute.

Her work is well known with over 160 scientific publications that have received more than 14800 citations and a ten best paper award nominations and awards. She is co-inventor of 40 filed patents and she is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences.

She is a regular member of the program committee of the most important ACM/IEEE/AAAI international conferences in her fields. She has also been a co-chair of 15 ACM/IEEE/AAAI conferences. She is an advisor to the Spanish Government, to the computer science departments at UPF (barcelona), Kings College (London) and Univ of Lisbon (Portugal), to the eHealth center at the UOC (Barcelona) and to Mahindra Comviva. She has been selected as the speaker of a select group of 9 experts commissioned by the Spanish Government to write a white book about Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. She is a member elect of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.

Nuria’s work and professional trajectory has received many awards and recognitions. 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).

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.