Nuria Oliver Ramírez
New Technologies 2021Scientific Director of the Fundación de la Comunitat Valenciana, ELLIS Unit, Alicante
(Alicante, aged 51).
She holds a Master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the UPM and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
She has over 25 years’ experience in research into the modelling and prediction of human behaviour based on data and human–machine interaction. She has made fundamental scientific contributions to artificial intelligence (AI) methods for modelling human behaviour based on data and the development of intelligent interactive systems.
In March 2020, she was appointed Commissioner to the Presidency of the Comunitat Valenciana on Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Strategy to combat COVID-19. In this role, she leads a team of over 20 scientists working on the use of data science to support public policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She has been a researcher at Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA, USA), the first Chief Scientific Officer at Telefónica R&D (2007–2015) and the first Global Head of Data Science Research at Vodafone (2017–2019).
She has authored over 160 scientific publications, nine of which have received awards or nominations for best paper. She is the Spanish computer scientist with the highest h-index and ranks in the top 1 per cent of ACM scientists worldwide. She is the inventor of more than 40 registered patents and has co-chaired 21 conferences.
The jury for the Rei Jaume I Prize for New Technologies, meeting in Valencia, has unanimously decided to award the 2021 prize to Ms Nuria Oliver Ramirez.
She has made fundamental scientific and technological contributions to artificial intelligence methods for modelling human behaviour using large datasets. She has pioneered the use of dynamic graphical models to recognise human interactions, with applications in healthcare and wellbeing systems, amongst other fields.
Her professional career is marked by projects with a significant social impact, in which data science and artificial intelligence are the key technologies.
She is a shining example of intrapreneurship within a multinational company, with 41 patents and numerous technologies applied in our society. During the current COVID-19 health crisis, Dr Oliver is leading a group of experts specialising in highly accurate computational epidemiological models to recommend interventions that will contain the spread of the virus at minimal cost. This is a testament to her social commitment, putting cutting-edge technology at the service of a major health crisis.
