ELLIS ALICANTE FOUNDATION - Key Persons
Aditya Gulati is an ELLIS PhD student. He holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science Engineering from the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore. His research interests lie in modelling human behaviour and artificial intelligence. His supervisors are Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante), Miguel Angel Lozano (University of Alicante) and Bruno Lepri (Fondazione Bruno Kessler).
Adrián Arnaiz Rodríguez is an ELLIS PhD student. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering (2019, Universidad de Burgos) and a Master's degree in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (2021, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). His PhD topics are AI Fairness, Causality and Graph Theory to enhance ethics, accountability, and transparency in algorithmic decision-making. His supervisors are Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante), Francisco Escolano (Universidad de Alicante) and Manuel Gómez Rodríguez (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems).
Job Titles:
- Student ( Secondary Location )
Benedikt Höltgen is an ELLIS PhD student supervised by Bob Williamson in Tübingen and Nuria Oliver in Alicante. He holds Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy as well as a Master's degree in Logic and Philosophy of Science from LMU Munich. He also completed a Master's in Computer Science at the University of Oxford and then continued to work there with the OATML group as an external collaborator. Ben is broadly interested in topics at the intersection of Machine Learning, Mathematics, and Philosophy. As a starting point for his PhD, he wants to explore foundational questions about Algorithmic Fairness.
Job Titles:
- Governance
- SAB Member, Associate Scientist
- Senior Researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Bruno Lepri is senior researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy) where he leads the Mobile and Social Computing Lab (MobS). He has recently launched the Center for Computational Social Science and Human Dynamics, a joint initiative between Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the University of Trento. Since July 2022, he is the Chief Scientific Office of Ipazia, a new company active on AI solutions for financial services and energy management. From 2019 to 2022, Bruno was also the Chief AI Scientist of ManpowerGroup where he has collaborated with the global innovation team on AI projects for recruitment and HR management. Bruno is also a senior research affiliate at Data-Pop Alliance, the first think-tank on big data and development co-created by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Media Lab, Overseas Development Institute, and Flowminder. Finally, he has co-founded Profilio, a startup on AI-driven psychometric analysis. In 2010 he won a Marie Curie Cofund postdoc fellowship and he has held a 3 year postdoc position at MIT Media Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Trento. His research interests include computational social science, personality computing, network science, and machine learning. His research has received attention from several international press outlets and obtained the 10-year impact award at MUM 2021, the James Chen Annual Award for best 2016 UMUAI paper, and the best paper award at ACM Ubicomp 2014.
Lepri, B., Oliver, N., & Pentland, A. (2021). Ethical machines: The human-centric use of artificial intelligence. iScience , 24(3), 102249.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Staff Member
- Office Manager
Cristina has a degree in business administration. She has studied and worked in three continents, including positions in New York and Beijing, where for two years she collaborated with the Spanish Embassy as a consultant. She has worked in management areas in diverse fields such as universities, private companies and the service sector. She has been responsible for fundraising and partnerships for the Red Cross in Alicante.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Scientist
- Associate Scientist / Data - Pop Alliance
- Development Economist
- Equipo
- Investigador Asociado
Dr. Emmanuel Letouzé is a development economist and demographer whose work focuses on the applications and implications of data, statistics, technology and AI for development and democracy in the Global South, especially Latin America, Africa, the Middle-East, and South-East Asia. He is the Director of Data-Pop Alliance, a non-governmental organisation he co-founded in 2013 with the MIT Media Lab, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and ODI. He is a Founding Fellow at MIT Connection Science, a Visiting Scientist at HHI, and a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2021-23). Emmanuel co-founded the Open Algorithms (OPAL) project, which he directed from 2017-2020. He recently served as an appointed member of the European Commission's Expert group on the use of private data for official statistics, is a founding member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD), and was a Program Committee Member of the 1st and 2nd editions of the UN World Data Forum (2017 and 2018). He is the author of UN Global Pulse's White Paper on "Big Data for Development" (2012), where he worked as Senior Development Economist, and of 2 OECD's Fragile States reports. He previously worked as an Economist for UNDP in New York (2006-10) and in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the French government as a Technical Assistant on official statistics (2000-04). He holds a BA in Political Science and Economics (1997) and an MA in Applied Economics-Economic Demography (2000) from Sciences Po Paris, an MA in International Affairs-Economic Development (2006) from Columbia University, where he was a Fulbright Fellow, and a PhD in Demography (2016) from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation focused on cell-phone data analysis for demo-economic research, followed by a post-doctoral position (2016-17) with the MIT Media Lab.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Scientist
- Chairman of Digital Transport
- Equipo
- Investigadora Asociada
Professor Flora Salim is the CISCO Chair of Digital Transport, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney. Her research, on behaviour modelling, AI and machine learning on time-series and spatio-temporal sensor data, has been funded by the ARC, Humboldt Foundation, Bayer Foundation, Microsoft Research, Qatar National Research Fund, and many local and international industry partners. She won the Women in AI Awards 2022 ANZ - Defence and Intelligence category. She is a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts, an Honorary Professor of RMIT University, an Associate Investigator of ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society, a member of ACM UbiComp Steering Commitee, an Editorial Board member of Nature Scientific Reports, Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, Area Editor of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Associate Editor of Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT). She obtained her PhD from Monash University in 2009.
Francisco Escolano [BD in Computer Science - Polytecnical University of Valencia (Spain)-1992, PhD in Computer Science - University of Alicante (Spain) - 1997] is Full Professor of Computer Science and AI in the University of Alicante. His research started in the domain of medical imaging for Computer Vision, followed by work in Bayesian inference and information theory with Prof. Alan Yuille
In 2001, all these experiences crystallized in the creation of the Robot Vision Group that he led (2001-2011). See part of these efforts in http://videolectures.net/francisco_escolano/.
In 2012 he co-funded the Mobile Vision Research Lab (MVRLab) of the University of Alicante, whose main objective is to endow the Visually Impaired with artificial vision capabilities using smartphones. This work obtained twice the Vodafone "Mobile Application for Good" award in 2014 and 2017. The most important development to date is Navilens (a color QR quaternary code that captures the attention of the mobile phone's camera).
More recently, he joined the Data Science against COVID-19 Taskforce led by Dr. Nuria Oliver. The team participated and won the first prize of the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. This new dimension of his research will grow by tutoring two ELLIS PhD students at the ELLIs Unit Alicante.
Julien Colin is an ELLIS PhD student. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics and Chemistry (2019, University of Lorraine) and a Master's degree in Cognitive Sciences: Natural and Artificial Cognition (2021, INP Grenoble). Before the start of his PhD, he worked as a research assistant; first at ANITI for 6 months (2021, Toulouse) then at Brown University for 5 months (2022, Providence). His PhD topic is centered around eXplainable AI and Neuroscience. In his research, he is interested in developing methods to better understand Intelligent systems. His supervisors are Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante) and Thomas Serre (ANITI).
Job Titles:
- Student ( Secondary Location )
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Scientist
- Equipo
- Investigador Asociado
Manuel Gomez Rodriguez is a faculty at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Manuel develops human-centered machine learning models and algorithms for the analysis, modeling and enhancement of social, information and networked systems. He has received several recognitions for his research, including an outstanding paper award at NeurIPS'13 and a best research paper honorable mention at KDD'10 and WWW'17. He has served as track chair for FAT* 2020, workshop chair for ICML 2022 and area chair for every major conference in machine learning, data mining and the Web. Manuel has co-authored over 50 publications in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, WWW, KDD, WSDM, AAAI) and journals (PNAS, Nature Communications, JMLR, PLOS Computational Biology). Manuel holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Carlos III University, a MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and has received postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. You can find more about him at http://learning.mpi-sws.org.
Miguel Angel Lozano holds a Degree (2001) and a PhD (2008) in Computer Engineering from the University of Alicante. In 2002 he obtained a FPI research grant, and since 2004 he has been a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Alicante. He has conducted research stays at the Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition Lab of the University of York, as well as the Bioinformatics Lab at the University of Helsinki. From 2002 to 2010, Miguel Ángel Lozano Ortega developed his research within the Robot Vision Group (RVG), and in 2010 he joined the Mobile Vision Research Lab (MVRLab). He is currently the head of MVRLab, a group that focuses on pattern recognition and computer vision on mobile devices, the director of the Master's Degree in Software Development for Mobile Devices, and the Coordinator for Quality Assurance and Educational Innovation at the Polytechnic School. His research interests include pattern recognition, graph matching and clustering, and computer vision. In 2008 he defended his PhD Thesis, entitled "Kernelized Graph Matching and Clustering". Within MVRLab and in collaboration with Neosistec, some applications aimed to assist blind people have been developed: Aerial Obstacle Detection (AOD), SuperVision, and NaviLens. AOD and NaviLens won the "Application Mobile for Good" award in the 7th and 11th Vodafone Foundation Awards (2014, 2017), respectively.
In 2020, he joined the Data Science against COVID19 taskforce of the Valencian Government. This team participated and won first prize in the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. Moreover, he is tutoring two ELLIS PhD students at the ELLIS Unit Alicante.
Mona Schirmer is an ELLIS PhD student at the University of Amsterdam and a machine learning consultant at the World Bank. Before that, she completed a master's in statistics at Humboldt University and Technical University in Berlin as well as a French engineering diploma at ENSAE. In her Bachelor's, she studied economics and political science at Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Munich. Her research interests lie in probabilistic machine learning und machine learning for social good. She visited the ELLIS Alicante unit in May 2022.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Scientist
- Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Sussex
Novi Quadrianto is currently a Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Sussex, UK. Prior to Sussex, Novi was a Newton International Fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy at the Machine Learning Group in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. Novi received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia in 2012. In 2019, Novi was awarded a European Research Council ERC Starting Grant for a project on developing Bayesian models and algorithms for fairness and transparency (BayesianGDPR). Since March 2021, Novi also leads a BCAM Severo Ochoa Strategic Lab on Trustworthy Machine Learning in Spain. Since July 2022, Novi holds an Adjunct position at Monash University in Indonesia. For more information, please check https://wearepal.ai/
Job Titles:
- Cofounder
- Scientific Director
Nuria Oliver is Scientific Director and one of the founders of the ELLIS Alicante Foundation. She is co-founder and vice-president of ELLIS.
She is Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vodafone Institute and Chief Data Scientist at DataPop Alliance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was Commissioner to the President of the Valencian Government on AI and Data Science against COVID-19. She advises several universities, governments and companies.
Previously, she was Director of Data Science Research at Vodafone, Scientific Director at Telefónica and researcher at Microsoft Research. She holds a PhD from the Media Lab at MIT and an Honorary Doctorate from the University Miguel Hernández.
She is an IEEE Fellow, and ACM Fellow, and EurAI Fellow and elected permanent member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain. She is also a member of CHI Academy and the Academia Europaea. She is well known for her work in computational models of human behavior, human computer-interaction, mobile computing and big data for social good. Named inventor of 40 patents. She has received many awards, including the MIT TR100 Young Innovator Award (2004), Spanish National Computer Science Award (2016), Engineer of the Year (2018), Valencian Medal to Business and Social Impact (2018), Data Scientist of the Year (2019), Jaume I Award in New Technologies (2021) and Abie Technology Leadership Award by AnitaB.org (2021).
Martinez-Garcia, M., Rabasa, A., Barber, X., Polotskaya, K., Roomp, K., & Oliver, N. (2021). Key factors affecting people's unwillingness to be confined during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain: a large-scale population study. Nature Scientific Reports , 11, 1-18.
Lepri, B., Oliver, N., & Pentland, A. (2021). Ethical machines: The human-centric use of artificial intelligence. iScience , 24(3), 102249.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Staff Member
- Head of Operations
Job Titles:
- Associate Scientist / ETH Zurich