Nuria Oliver facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Nuria Oliver
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| Nationality | Spanish |
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| Thesis | Towards Perceptual Computing: Statistical Modeling of Human Individual and Interactive Behaviors (2000) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alex Pentland |
Nuria Oliver is a famous computer scientist from Spain. She leads the ELLIS Alicante Foundation. She is also the Chief Data Scientist at DataPop Alliance. Nuria Oliver is known for her work in Artificial Intelligence (AI). She studies how computers can understand human behavior. She also works with mobile phones and large amounts of data, called Big Data, to help society.
Nuria Oliver has worked at big companies like Vodafone, Telefónica, and Microsoft Research. She earned her PhD from the Media Lab at MIT. Her research has been used in over 24,000 other studies, making her one of the most cited female computer scientists in Spain.
Contents
About Nuria Oliver
Her Early Life and Education
Nuria Oliver was born in Alicante, Spain. She studied Telecommunications Engineering at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. She finished her degree in 1994 and won the Spanish First National Prize for Telecommunication Engineers.
In 1995, Nuria received a special scholarship to study at MIT in the USA. There, she earned her doctorate from the Media Lab. Her studies focused on how computers can understand what people are doing and feeling.
Working in Technology
After MIT, Nuria joined Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA, in 2000. She worked there until 2007. Her job was to research how people interact with computers.
In 2007, she moved back to Spain to work at Telefónica R&D in Barcelona. She became the Director of Multimedia Research. At Telefónica, she explored how mobile phones could be used as sensors. This meant using phones to gather information about human activities.
Later, in 2017, Nuria joined Vodafone as the Director of Data Science Research. She also became the first Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance. This group uses Big Data to solve big problems around the world. She worked as a Chief Scientific Adviser at the Vodafone Institute until 2024.
Helping During the COVID-19 Pandemic
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Nuria Oliver played a very important role. She was named Commissioner for AI and COVID-19 for the Valencia region in Spain. She led a team that used data science to help the government during the health crisis.
Her team created a survey called covid19impactsurvey. Over 700,000 people in Spain took part in this survey. This helped gather important information about the pandemic. Nuria's team, ValenciaIA4COVID, also won the $500,000 XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. This was a big competition to find solutions for the pandemic. It was the first time a Spanish team won an XPrize.
Recognitions and Awards
Nuria Oliver has received many awards for her amazing work.
- In 1994, she won the Spanish First National Prize of Telecommunication Engineers.
- She was named one of the "Top 100 innovators under 35" by MIT Technology Review.
- She received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She was the first Spanish woman computer scientist to get this award.
- In 2016, she won the European Digital Woman of the Year Award.
- She was honored with the Ada Byron prize from the University of Deusto. This award celebrates women who make progress in new technology areas.
- In 2017, she was named an ACM Fellow for her work on understanding human behavior using data.
- In 2018, she became a permanent member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.
- In 2021, she won the Rey Jaime I award in New Technologies.
- In 2024, she won the Hypatia European Science Prize from the city of Barcelona and Academia Europaea.
Her Work and Impact
Nuria Oliver is known for her work in several key areas:
- Computational Models of Human Behavior: She studies how computers can understand and predict what people do.
- Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): This field looks at how people and computers work together. Nuria helps make these interactions better and more natural.
- Mobile Computing: She explores how mobile phones can be used in new and smart ways.
- Big Data for Social Good: Nuria uses very large sets of data to solve problems that help society. This includes work in public health and development.
Her work helps create smarter systems that can understand us better. It also shows how technology can be used to improve people's lives.
Images for kids
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Nuria Oliver
See also
In Spanish: Nuria Oliver para niños
