ECE Distinguished Speaker Series: Nuria Oliver - Data Science against COVID-19
Abstract:
In my talk, I will describe the work that I have been doing since March 2020, leading a multi-disciplinary team of 20+ volunteer scientists working very closely with the Presidency of the Valencian Government in Spain on 4 large areas: (1) human mobility modeling; (2) computational epidemiological models (both metapopulation, individual and LSTM-based models); (3) predictive models; and (4) citizen surveys via the COVID19impactsurvey (https://covid19impactsurvey.org) with over 600,000 answers worldwide.
I will describe the results that we have produced in each of these areas, including winning the 500K XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge and best paper award at ECML-PKDD 2021. I will share the lessons learned in this very special initiative of collaboration between the civil society at large (through the survey), the scientific community (through the Expert Group) and a public administration (through the Commissioner at the Presidency level). WIRED magazine just published an article describing our story: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/valencia-ai-covid-data
Biography
Nuria Oliver is co-founder and vice-president of ELLIS (The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems), co-founder of the Alicante ELLIS Unit, devoted to research on "Human(ity)-centric Artificial Intelligence", Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance and Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vodafone Institute. In March 2020, she was named Commissioner for the President of the Valencian Region on AI Strategy and Data Science to fight Covid-19. Since then, she has led a team of with 20+ data scientists. She has also led the ValenciaIA4COVID team, which has recently won the 500k XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. It's the first time that a Spanish team wins an XPRIZE competition.
She has over 25 years of research experience in the areas of human behavior modeling and prediction from data and human-computer interaction. She has been a researcher at Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA), the first female Scientific Director at Telefonica R&D for over 8 years and the first Director of Research in Data Science at Vodafone globally (2017-2019). Her work in the computational modeling of human behavior using Artificial Intelligence techniques, human-comput