Human Behavior Modeling and Understanding is a key challenge in the development of intelligent systems and a great asset to help us make better decisions. Over the course of the past 22 years, I have worked on building automatic data-driven machine-learning based models of human behaviors for a variety of applications, including smart rooms, smart cars, smart offices, smart mobile phones and smart cities.
In my talk, I will describe two of such projects. The first project is a smartphone app to automatically detect boredom. This project was received the best paper award at Ubicomp 2015. The second project focuses on automatically detecting crime hotspots in a city through mobile data.
Nuria Oliver, is Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone, Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance and Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vodafone Institute. She has over 20 years of research experience in the areas of human behavior modeling and prediction from data and human-computer interaction.
She holds a PhD in perceptual intelligence from MIT. She worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research, as the first female Scientific Director at Telefonica R&D and the first Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance and Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone. In addition, she is Chief Scientific Advisor to the Vodafone Institute.
She is a Fellow of European Association of Artificial Intelligence in 2016, the IEEE and the ACM, and a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.
Her work is well known with over 150 scientific publications that have received more than 14600 citations and a ten best paper award nominations and awards. She is named inventor of 40 filed patents and she is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences. She is an advisor to several computer science departments in Spain, UK and Portugal. She is also an advisor to the Spanish Government on the strategic research plan and on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data.
She devotes part of her time to service to the scientific community. She has held/will hold a co-chair role of 16 ACM/IEEE international conferences and is a member of the program committee of the top international conferences in her field.
Nuria’s work and professional trajectory has received several awards, including the MIT TR100 (today TR35) Young Innovator Award (2004), the Rising Talent award by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society (2009), the European Digital Woman of the Year award (2016) and the Spanish National Computer Science Angela Robles Award (2016). She has been named one of the top 11 Artificial Intelligence influencers worldwide by Pioneering Minds (2017), one of Spanish wonderful minds in technology by EL PAIS newspaper (2017), “an outstanding female director in technology” (El PAIS, 2012), one of “100 leaders for the future” (Capital, 2009) and one of the “40 youngsters who will mark the next millennium” (El PAIS, 1999).
Her passion is to improve people’s quality of life, both individually and collectively, through technology. She is also passionate about scientific outreach. Hence, she regularly collaborates with the media (press, radio, TV) and gives non-technical talks about science and technology to broad audiences, and particularly to teenagers, with a special interest on girls.