We are honored to announce that Dr Nuria Oliver will serve as Data-Pop Alliance’s first Chief Data Scientist starting November 8th, 2016.

Dr Oliver served as Scientific Director of Telefónica for close to 9 years, and was previously a researcher at Microsoft for 7 years. Dr Oliver holds a PhD from MIT Media Lab, where her dissertation, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, our Academic Director, focused on perceptual intelligence. Dr Oliver had been one of Data-Pop Alliance’s Research Affiliates since our launch.

Dr Oliver is one of the world’s foremost computer scientists working on machine-learning based computational models of human behavior, human computer-interaction, intelligent user interfaces, and mobile computing. She is also well known for her work on Big Data for Social Good. She has published over 150 scientific papers and book chapters that have been cited over 10,400 times and received numerous awards, including, in 2016, the Gaudi Gresol Award to Excellence in Science and Technology and the Spanish Ada Byron Award by the University of Deusto. She is a Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence and a Distinguished Scientist by the ACM.

As our first Chief Data Scientist, Dr Oliver will provide strategic guidance to Data-Pop Alliance’s analytics projects and plans, oversee specific parts of our work on algorithmic governance, contribute to our engagement and training activities towards women and girls in Africa and other developing regions, and help develop Data-Pop Alliance’s partnerships and presence around the world.