Nuria Oliver

Nuria Oliver was director of research in data science at Vodafone between 2017 and 2019. She is co-founder and director of the ELLIS Alicante foundation, chief data scientist at Data-Pop Alliance and an elect member at the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. She has over 20 years of research experience in human behaviour modelling, human-computer interaction and using Big Data for social good. She was scientific director at Telefonica R&D for over 8 years, the first woman to hold such a position. She also spent over seven years at Microsoft Research. She holds a PhD in perceptual intelligence from MIT. She holds an honorary PhD from the University Miguel Hernandez.

Her work is well known with over 180 scientific publications that have received more than 24000 citations and 11 best paper award nominations and awards. She is co-inventor of 40 filed patents and she is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences.

Nuria’s work and professional trajectory has received numerous awards, including the MIT TR100 (today TR35) Young Innovator Award (2004), the Rising Talent award by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society (2009), the European Digital Woman of the Year award (2016), the Abie Technology Leadership Award (2021) and the King James I award on New Technologies (2021). She has been named a “changemaker” by Forbes magazine (2023), “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).

She became an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2016, a fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence in 2016 and an IEEE and ACM Fellow in 2017.

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.