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Nuria Oliver

Spanish computer scientist

  • 5 min read
  • 3 chapters
Portrait of Nuria Oliver by Ester Perez Broto
ester perez broto · CC BY-SA 2.0

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Biography

Nuria graduated with a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in 1994. She was awarded the Spanish First National Prize of Telecommunication Engineers in 1994.

In 1995 she received a La Caixa fellowship to study at MIT, where she received her doctorate at the Media Lab in the area perceptual intelligence. In 2000, she joined as a Research in the area of human-computer interfaces for Microsoft Research in Redmond USA and worked there until 2007.

In 2007 she moved to Spain to work at Telefónica R&D in Barcelona as Director of Multimedia Research, the only female director hired at Telefónica R&D at the time. Her work focused on the use of the mobile phone as a sensor of human activity, and worked there until 2016.

In 2017 she joined Vodafone as Director of Data Science Research, and also was named the first Chief Data Scientist at DataPop Alliance, an international non-profit organization created by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Media Lab and Overseas Development Institute devoted to leveraging Big Data to improve the world. She served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Vodafone Institute until 2024.

She is a member of the external advisory board of the ETIC department at the Pompeu Fabra University, the LASIGE department at the University of Lisbon, the Informatics Department at King's College London, the eHealth Center at the Open University of Catalonia and Mahindra Comviva. She is the spokesperson and a member of the High Level Advisory Committee to the Spanish Government on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. She is also a member of the Strategic Advisory Board to the Innovation Agency of Valencia.

In 2018 she was elected permanent member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.

In 2019, she launched a successful bid for Alicante to host a research unit of ELLIS, a network of European AI research laboratories.

In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, she was named Commissioner of the Presidency of Valencia for AI and COVID-19, and led the data-science team for the Valencian Government during the crisis until March 2022. She was responsible for designing and launching covid19impactsurvey, one of the largest citizen-science surveys in Spain, with over 700,000 participants.

She was co-leader of ValenciaIA4COVID, the winning team of the $500,000 XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge, sponsored by Cogizant. This was the first Spanish team to win an XPrize competition.

In 2024 she was selected by the EU as the chair General Purpose AI transparency code-of-practice working group, as part of implementing the AI Act. She was also the winner of the 2024 Hypatia European Science Prize, awarded by the city of Barcelona and Academia Europaea.

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